Browsing by Subject "History of Medicine and Biological Sciences"

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    Assimilating Hawai‘i:racial science in a colonial “Laboratory,” 1919-1939
    (2012-07) Manganaro, Christine Leah
    This dissertation demonstrates how American physical anthropologists and sociologists working in Hawai‘i framed the biological and cultural assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into Americanness as natural rather than ideological, thus naturalizing the islands' incorporation into the United States as a story about integration rather than colonization. Scientists argued that mixing in this "racial laboratory" improved the quality of the majority non-white population, that migration and colonization were features of a natural historical trajectory of Americanization, and that race relations in the islands were the product of a human ecology that went hand in hand with capitalist development. All of these ideas became the racial common sense that traveled to the continental U.S. and perpetuated American amnesia about empire. This project revisits the historiography of the supposed retreat of scientific racism and, by closely examining the methods, actual data, and conclusions of scientists whose work shaped their disciplines, demonstrates how racialist thinking persisted in work that has been characterized as either questioning the race concept, as politically progressive, or both. Taking cues from studies of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i and recent debate about the actuality of a retreat of scientific racism in the United States, this dissertation demonstrates how treating assimilation as a natural process that needed to be better understood, rather than a discursive project of colonial governance, legitimated American power in the islands. During a period when scientists and politicians alike were interested in fitness, degeneracy, and the consequences of immigration and miscegenation as part of debates about national progress, scientists viewed Hawai‘i as a laboratory where they could conduct research on heredity and cultural change that was difficult or impossible to do in the continental United States. American social scientists working in Hawai‘i framed the processes they studied, particularly the assimilation of mixed race people and Asian migrants into American culture and identity, as natural rather than ideological. American scientists with sometimes opposing political orientations such as Louis R. Sullivan and L.C. Dunn concluded that, unlike mixed race people generally and especially "mulattoes," Chinese-Hawaiian "hybrids" were actually improvements on their supposedly pure parents (chapter 1). Physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro, in his study of racial plasticity among migrants in a changed environment, developed few concrete findings, but helped establish Hawai‘i as a long-term human research site. Sociologist Romanzo Adams, who was trained at the University of Chicago, produced the history of Hawai‘i as a history of admixture that exaggerated the degree of interracial reproduction and suggested that the territorial population was well on its way to complete biological amalgamation (chapter 3). Through a series of interviews with couples in interracial marriages and the collection of student papers about identity and racial prejudice, many of which contradicted Adams' findings and predictions, graduate researcher Margaret M. Lam recorded the testimony of residents who both resisted certain types of racialization as they also participated in the construction and maintenance of racial boundaries and meanings (chapter 4). Finally, sociologist Andrew Lind, framed social inequality and tense race relations in the territory as a product of competition for jobs and housing, a "natural" feature of "human ecology," rather than a product of intentional labor control and government decisions (chapter 5). This advanced the idea that social conditions in Hawai‘i were a natural product of modernization rather colonization.
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    The perfect food and the filth disease: milk, typhoid fever, and the science of state medicine in Victorian Britain, 1850-1900
    (2011-06) Steere-Williams, Jacob
    This dissertation examines the complex ways that public health practices developed in Victorian Britain, particularly how standards of scientific knowledge interacted with social and cultural ideas. My central argument is that cultural conceptions of milk as a wholesome, healthful food were intimately tied to and in some ways challenged by the rapidly developing sciences of epidemiology and analytical chemistry, creating a framework for public health policies. This was most apparent at the central level through the work of the Medical Department of the Local Government Board and the Government Chemical Laboratory of the Excise Department, and locally throughout Britain through the work of local Medical Officers of Health and Analytical Chemists. I demonstrate that epidemiologists, chemists, and veterinarians, were the scientific translators of deeply embedded social concerns about purity and progress. These disciplines were largely framed by interactions with different facets of the public; scientific knowledge about milk and disease was reified by milk producers and milk consumers who stressed the importance of purity as representative of cultural progress and British superiority. Milk was not a static cultural or material product, and its cultural meaning and material use changed dramatically throughout the period I investigate. Such analysis sheds historical light on contemporary problems about food safety and reminds us that consumption practices are always embedded within cultural assumptions about nation, personhood, science, and progress.