Written By: Sarah Toland
The development of the Spirometer, which was coupled with the crystallisation of Social Darwinist thinking, diverged into a tradition of racism was weaved into the medical research into this device. From when slavery was an institutionalised practice, American physicians were instrumental in producing a science attributed to racial othering, which grew into a laboratory- based evidential and more precise measurement for the science of vital capacity and race difference intermingling with scientific discovery.
This began with John Hutchinson, inventor of the Spirometer who organised the meaning of vital capacity measurement which intrigued scientists in the nineteenth century. However, this would change in the Twentieth century as the rise of public health and laboratory-based medicine were re-examining the importance of the tool. At this time there were changes being made to medicine such as the integration of basic science into clinical training, and hospitals transforming into the site of advancement, where people experimented with ideas that were applied later. Public health began to become a professionalised practice with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which led to the founding the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health.
Although in the US this was appreciated by scientists, experts abroad were more critical as many criticised the technicalities of the instrument and what is involved in the assessment of lung function. Meaning that the standardisation of lung capacity being measured proved to be quite difficult. Christopher Crenner observed that “judgments about normality entailed judgments about human difference; and among the many categories of difference, none in the day entailed greater risks or harm than race.” This meant that by 1930, physician-scientists in Europe, the United States, China, and India established the scientific fact that vital capacity differed in those who were “non-White,” “non-European,” or “non-Western”, which meant that the white body was taken as the standard and would act as a comparative measure. Now a complex scientific problem became a quest to devise a system for clarification, either using anthropometric variables, stage of disease, occupation, or most pertinent, race. These three interacting projects emerged as the classification and establishing norms, which would hugely change research on lung capacity measurement.
During the First World War Royal Air Force, known as RAF pilots in Britain, garnered the attention of those scientists involved in investigating vital capacity, which later became a screening tool for the RAF, this was due to the problem of the connection between high flying and oxygen deprivation. Eustace. H Cluver, a South-African public health researcher and administrator, had seen the research of the RAF and was inspired to conduct the same research in the South African Air Force. Like the British case, he wanted to use vital capacity in order to assess a pilot’s adaptability. He stressed the value of the respiratory rate and the ventilation rate, which were both determined by breathing into the spirometer.
In 1923, Cluver made a scorecard which incorporated eight different tests for the assessment of physical fitness. Consistent with the guidelines of the Medical and Surgical Aspects of Aviation, the minimal vital capacity for the air force was set at 3,000 cc. However, he would attach new meanings to vital capacity measurements. This was happening at a time where racial segregation was becoming a more tightly regimented practice, and thus, African- Americans in the American South were facing increased marginalization. The social and political effects of the deterioration of ‘white’ bodies captured the gaze of the U.S. Carnegie Corporation in the 1920s.
Scientists such as Jokl and Cluver claim that the growth of physical competence was indistinguishable amongst racial groups, which provided evidence for the equality of man. With the beginning of the Second World War, labour and therefore, working capacity of all races was needed to win the war. Therefore, the South African Association for the Advancement of Science conducted studies of physical fitness, including nutrition and training. This training was mainly concentrated on so-called “poor white recruits”. Among these tests performed, vital capacity was measured. The book where these findings were presented by Jokl and Culver: In Training and Efficiency: An Experiment in Physical and Economic Rehabilitation, The Johannesburg Sunday Times stated that “the poor-white is biologically sound and can be turned into a valuable citizen.” What this statement seems to leave out is the majority Black population, and whether or not they were biologically sound, and valuable citizens. This demonstrates that from the nineteenth century onwards, research conducted on lung capacity in education and anthropometry established scientific racial othering in the field of lung capacity into the twentieth century.
Race was entrenched into a wider system of standardizing lung assessment technology, which stretched into other ambiguities connected to vital capacity measurements, which were overshadowed. The Journal of the American Medical Association and the Archives of Internal Medicine compared Blacks, Chinese and Indians to groups referred to as White, or generally Western. The transnationality of this research only furthered the framework of racial othering in the field of lung capacity. This became the standard of racial difference as a scientific fact. This reflected twentieth century concerns of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and the migration northwards of African Americans. According to investigators of race and sex, rather than socioeconomic differences were apparent, because white children who were more active from a lower-class background achieved higher averages from children of high-class backgrounds, whereas normal values in children of colour were “strikingly below that obtained for any of the other groups.” It was concluded that there was “a possible racial factor” in vital capacity. Subsequent research was conducted in the 1920s and 1930s that was founded on this framework. Despite the variance of interpretation, this notion of intrinsic difference has continued into the present.
One of the philanthropic endeavors of the Rockefeller Foundation was to establish medical education in China. Over four months, the First Medical Commission of the Rockefeller Foundation visited hospitals and medical schools around China and found that staff had poor training, facilities were adverse, and they had inadequate medical equipment and recommended that foundation expand medical research, education, and hospitals. This was achieved through the purchase of the Union Medical School of Peking in 1915. This established a monopoly of missionaries, which became an exclusive site of Western medicine within China.
With noticing a difference in “negro children” this invokes the involvement in a ‘racial factor’ explaining lower vital capacity in Chinese people, which is relative to ‘foreigners’ more generally. This was achieved through “measurements […] taken under the same conditions.” This was still a construction with the East/West binary. On the other hand, still there is a diverseness in the case of the Chinese, remarking that Central China would not be applied “to the different races of the Chinese”. Over the next decade racial differences would be studied worldwide in terms of lung capacity, which are still inflected in contemporary discussion.
Bibliography
Braun, Lundy. ‘Globalizing Spirometry: The “Racial Factor” in Scientific Medicine’ in Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. 109-137.
Retrospect Journal 