The Measure of an Organ: Epistemologies of Quantification and Bodily Visibility across Time and Space

Abstract

This panel examines the historical role of measurement in creating and rendering specific body parts visible and actionable in historical and epistemological spaces that lie outside of those examined in traditional histories of biomedical corporeality. Each paper interrogates the role of measurement in producing a particular body organ or system as an object to be analyzed, valued, and treated in commerce, medicine, social and political discourse, and economics. Different theories of medicine have attributed a range of function and relationality to the organs and systems of the body. Similarly, there is a well-developed literature about the role of quantification in the ideation of biomedically conceived bodies and their relationship to the state—including the appearance of notions of risk related to health, and the “burden of disease” both at the individual as well as at a larger societal level. Rather than think the history of organ’s measurement uniquely through biomedical, epidemiological and public health theory, this panel elucidates hitherto unexamined historical spaces where specific bodily parts—some of them unrecognizable to modern biomedical eyes—became salient through their inscription in epistemologies of quantification. In doing so, it historicizes organs and the geographically and chronologically specific processes of quantification and measurement through which they have come into existence as real social facts that, importantly, also shaped better-known narratives about the creation of measurable body parts.

The papers on this panel span geography and chronology, from the 17th-century Atlantic world, to the 19th-century American West, to Egypt in the middle of the twentieth century, to Communist China in the 1970s. The first paper explores how new methods of conceiving of the value of the human body—originated in maritime shipping technologies and West and West Central Africans notions of wealth—turned the gaze of slave traders, financiers, investors and health practitioners towards specific organs and parts of the human body in the 17th-century Atlantic world. The second paper examines the mid-19th-century phenomenon of “railway spine,” a condition that was most commonly diagnosed in women and linked to increasing train travel and the resulting social anxieties. The third paper traces the role of the increased prevalence of infection with Schistosoma mansoni and hepatitis C in Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century in shaping the biomedical imagination of the liver, and how that imagination was given force through specific methods of measuring the liver. The organ at the center of the fourth paper is the brain in 1970s Communist China. This paper explores the political and social role of numbness through the public displays and private conversations that surrounded the use of acupuncture analgesia, and the explanatory power of gate control theory.

Individual Presentations

• One Model Liver Measuring Infection with Schistosoma mansoni and Hepatitis C in 20th-Century Egypt - Jennifer L Derr, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Creating Body Parts: Atlantic Slavery and the Imagination of the Quantifiable Body - Pablo Gomez, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Pinpricks: The Curiosity of Analgesia and Gate Control Theory (1950-1970) - Lan A. Li, Rice University, Department of History, Medical Humanities Program

• “An Environmental History of Railway Spine: Chronic Pain, Human Bodies, and Industrializing Spaces in Nineteenth-Century America” - Tamara Venit-Shelton, Claremont McKenna College

Session Organizer

• Tamara Venit-Shelton, Claremont McKenna College