IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB336794907

Biometrics and citizenship: Measuring diabetes in the United States in the interwar years (2020)

Tuchman, Arleen Marcia (Author)

History of Science
Volume: 58
Issue: 2
Pages: 166-190

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275319869762

DOI: 10.1177/0073275319869762

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Normality Biopolitics Diabetes Citizenship Biometry 20th century, early United States Lees, Hannah

In 1936, the journalist Hannah Lees published “Two Million Tightrope Walkers,” drawing attention to the significant number of people in the United States estimated to have diabetes. Focusing on how people with diabetes should live, she emphasized the importance of recording the exact values of everything they ate and avoiding all “riotous living” lest they be unable to keep careful measurements of calories, insulin, and sleep. Employing two meanings of measured – as counted and as moderate – Lees was doing more than communicating how someone might control their disease; she was also calling for a “controlled and self-reliant citizenry.” Indeed, Lees insisted that diabetics who followed a regime of measurement “make a good deal better citizens than the average.” Drawing on the writings of Lees and other social commentators, I explore the link between biometrics, citizenship, and diabetes in the United States in the interwar years. In particular, I look at how this disease came to symbolize both the regimes of discipline thought to be necessary in a society moving to consumption as its economic motor, and the fears of what could happen if consumption ran amok. Biometrics, I argue, offered clinicians and patients a potent tool for measuring deviance and, potentially, for restoring a person to the “norm.”

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB336794907/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Laura Doan; (2017)
Marie Stopes’s Wonderful Rhythm Charts: Normalizing the Natural (/isis/citation/CBB938058385/)

Article Bernice L. Hausman; (2017)
Immunity, Modernity, and the Biopolitics of Vaccination Resistance (/isis/citation/CBB137306807/)

Article Fenneke Sysling; (2021)
Phrenology and the Average Person, 1840–1940 (/isis/citation/CBB219761273/)

Book Katie Day Good; (2020)
Bring the World to the Child: Technologies of Global Citizenship in American Education (/isis/citation/CBB674504373/)

Article Carola Ossmer; (2020)
Normal Development: The Photographic Dome and the Children of the Yale Psycho-Clinic (/isis/citation/CBB658328024/)

Article Birgit Lang; (2021)
Normal Enough? Krafft-Ebing, Freud, and Homosexuality (/isis/citation/CBB872822528/)

Article Emiliano Sfara; (2023)
From technique to normativity: The influence of Kant on Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life (/isis/citation/CBB410442454/)

Article Donna Tafreshi; (2022)
Adolphe Quetelet and the legacy of the “average man” in psychology (/isis/citation/CBB333634470/)

Article Roy E. Bailey; Timothy J. Hatton; Kris Inwood; (2016)
Health, height, and the household at the turn of the twentieth century (/isis/citation/CBB371293089/)

Article Porter, Theodore M.; (2014)
The Curious Case of Blending Inheritance (/isis/citation/CBB001420141/)

Article Roll-Hansen, Nils; (2009)
Sources of Wilhelm Johannsen's Genotype Theory (/isis/citation/CBB000932223/)

Article Tabery, James; (2008)
R. A. Fisher, Lancelot Hogben, and the Origin(s) of Genotype--Environment Interaction (/isis/citation/CBB000850683/)

Chapter Gayon, Jean; (2007)
Karl Pearson ou les enjeux du phénoménalisme dans les sciences biologiques vers 1900 (/isis/citation/CBB001022510/)

Article Pence, Charles H.; (2011)
“Describing Our Whole Experience”: The Statistical Philosophies of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson (/isis/citation/CBB001221537/)

Article Gomes, Ana Carolina Vimieiro; Silva, André Luiz dos Santos; Vaz, Alexandre Fernandez; (2013)
O Gabinete Biométrico da Escola de Educação Física do Exército: medir e classificar para produzir corpos ideais, 1930--1940 (/isis/citation/CBB001420683/)

Article Rushton, A. R.; (2000)
Nettleship, Pearson and Bateson: The biometric-Mendelian debate in a medical context (/isis/citation/CBB000110375/)

Article Charles H. Pence; (2022)
Of stirps and chromosomes: Generality through detail (/isis/citation/CBB367382199/)

Article Yafeng Shan; (2021)
Beyond Mendelism and Biometry (/isis/citation/CBB308136354/)

Book Larry Krotz; (2018)
Diagnosing the Legacy: The Discovery, Research, and Treatment of Type 2 Diabetes in Indigenous Youth (/isis/citation/CBB649052517/)

Book Tuchman, Arleen Marcia; (2020)
Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (/isis/citation/CBB285911296/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}