Phyllis M. Tookey Kerridge and the science of audiometric standardization in Britain

Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal

2020

In 1998, thousands of men and women in the United States woke up and found themselves changed. These individuals may have felt the same as they did the day before. They may have got out of bed, showered, made breakfast and driven to work as if it were any other day. Yet overnight they had become overweight. Some had become obese, others morbidly so. Still more had moved from the underweight category to become 'normal'. What kind of drastic vicissitudes had been realised to change so many bodies so rapidly? A sudden increase in nocturnal sleep-related eating disorders? Icing sugar falling like snow from the night sky? No: the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had changed the way the way that it measured Body Mass Index (BMI). Previously the United States had classified men with a BMI of 27.8 or above and women with a BMI of 27.3 or above as overweight. However, in 1998 it shifted the measurement down to 25, to fall in line with the World Health Organization's (WHO) standardised classification system and to allow for easier calculability. 1 In one fell swoop thousands more people in the US were obese. The media responded with panicked commentary about the obesity epidemic, without mentioning the artificial inflation of these new statistics. But why would they? It is perfectly natural to trust in the classification systems of scientists. Yet this example demonstrates that the thresholds of normalcy that we rely on for the classification of health are more fluid that we might imagine. In this book I argue that our bodies have been changed by measurement technology. Our capabilities and parameters have been defined so that we-youshift from states of normalcy to disability at the whim of mercurial thresholds. Disability history fascinates because it forces us to ask questions about our universal lived experience and how we ascribe meaning and significance to certain attributes and values. What should we be capable of ?

Section: Measuring Difference Numbering Normalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Numbering normal

Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal

2020

“…50 As I have previously argued with Virdi, through this standardisation the audiometer came to represent 'a new mechanistic understanding of auditory perception, one that merged a physical instrument with a more precise and measurable way of tracking perceptions of sound' . 51 As The Lancet recognised in 1933, advances in audiometry interrelated with developments in sound reproduction techniques more broadly, which were used not only in telephony but also in radio. 52 For example, the vacuum tube (in American English) or valve (in English) was essential in advancing the construction of radios, audiometers and telephony during this period.…”

Section: The Telephone As Audiometermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…54 For the MRC, the audiometer offered a way to 'merge clinical research with scientific efficiency', and it became central to their interwar hearing committee's projects on normal hearing and its potential restoration. 55 The audiometer was also critical to the interwar commitments of deaf educators and especially fuelled the legitimacy of the commitment to oralism, an educational method that prioritised speech and lip-reading to 'normalise' deaf children and force their integration into the hearing world. 56 It was further embraced by the industrial/ military nexus as a way of arbitrating compensation for hearing loss, as it was determined to be useful as a means of identifying 'impaired hearing' and hence 'the unfitness of applicants for insurance policies, automobile licenses, and for enlistment in the Army and Navy, also in the life protection tests of railroad and steamship companies, and in the health corrective examination of schools, colleges, and gymnasiums' .…”

Section: The Telephone As Audiometermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…She questioned the assumption that the zero line representing normal hearing was universal for all peoples of all ages and sexes, and 'demonstrated the arbitrariness of its construction' . 68 Kerridge's pioneering techniques were used in the prescribing and moderation of hearing aids, which she argued needed to be standardised within medicine. 69 In the spring of 1937, she opened the first hearing aid clinic in Britain, where she fitted patients for hearing aids based on their audiograms, taking the responsibility of hearing aid prescription away from commercial firms.…”

Section: The Telephone As Audiometermentioning

confidence: 99%

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The audiometer and the medicalisation of hearing loss

Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal

2020

When I was around seven years old, we went on a family trip to Aberdeen Science Centre. My memory of that day has largely faded, but I now know that something significant happened on that trip. One of the exhibitions featured an umbrella-style speaker used to demonstrate the normal ranges of human hearing. Human hearing is, as this book should have already made clear, a complicated topic. What we can hear depends both on loudness (decibel levels) and pitch (frequency levels), as well as a variety of other factors. This speaker was set up to gradually increase in frequency, so that it progressed from tones such as those you would hear on a standard piano, through to higher sounds like that of a microwave beeping, to end with barely audible tones of around 20,000 Hz. While Dad, my brother and I were laughing and joking about how long we could hear birdsong and so on, Mum was realising her hearing range had cut out long before ours. It was a strange way, no doubt, to find confirmation of one's deafness. The kind of technology that was used in this display relies on the standardisation of electronic sound, which was perfected and pursued in the interwar years as the audiometer was embraced as an objective tool to define noise limits and thresholds. Its utilisation of fixed thresholds for the normal ranges of hearing were also, as I explain in the section that follows, fixed through 'the telephone as audiometer'. The audiometer was elevated as a tool for testing both noise levels and hearing loss, I argue, because it provided an objective numerical inscription, which could be used to guard against malingering and to negotiate compensation claims for hearing loss. It was also as utilised in the prescription of hearing aids and, as I show in the section on 'The telephone as hearing aid', the interwar period featured an explosion of hearing aids based on

‘X-rays don't tell lies’: the Medical Research Council and the measurement of respiratory disability, 1936–1945

2019

Br J Hist Sci

Self Cite

During the first half of the twentieth century, the mining industry in Britain was subject to recurrent disputes about the risk to miners’ lungs from coal dust, moderated by governmental, industrial, medical and mining bodies. In this environment, precise measurements offered a way to present uncontested objective knowledge. By accessing primary source material from the National Archives, the South Wales Miners Library and the University of Bristol's Special Collections, I demonstrate the importance that the British Medical Research Council (MRC) attached to standardized instrumental measures as proof of objectivity, and explore the conflict between objective and subjective measures of health. Examination of the MRC's use of spirometry in their investigation of pneumoconiosis (miner's lung) from 1936 to 1945 will shed light on this conflict and illuminate the politics inherent in attempts to quantify disability and categorize standards of health.