From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing: Assessing the Human 9811575819, 9789811575815

Table of contents :
Series Editors’ Preface
Praise for From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
1: Introduction: What Measuring Means
Getting the Measure of Things: A Macro Approach
Measurement as an Indicator of Historical Forms of Human Cognition
Measurements and Powers: Foucault’s Heritage
Measurement, from Self-Care to Self-Management
Measurement Considered as a Praxis and a Contextualized Activity
Measurement as Assemblage
A Contextualized Activity
Measuring to Produce Ontologies
Making Others
Making Temporalities and Hierarchizing Rhythms
Structure of the Book
Bibliography
Part I: The Measurements of the Human Body Between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Century: from the Flesh to the Subjectivity
2: Producing Otherness Through Resemblance: Bodily Orifices and the Measuring of the Human (1800–1860)
Describing or Measuring Differences
Resemblance and Genealogical Thinking
From Beastly Ugliness to Fallacious Seduction
Sensory Organs: Controlling Time and the World
Clinical Clues: Generation Trouble
Numerating the Invisible
Conclusion: The Dangers of Analogy in Scientific Reasoning
References
Sources
Bibliography
3: Talking Bones: Age in Nineteenth-Century Forensic Handbooks (1813–1906)
The Anatomic Politics of “Bone Age”
Forensic Medicine Treatises: A Vantage Point to Examine Two Early and Late Nineteenth-Century Ontogenetic Models
Age as a Marker of Singularity at the Beginnings of Forensic Medicine in the Early Nineteenth Century
The “Médecin Total” and the Art of the Forensic Pathologist According to Fodéré
The Body: A Tangle of Passions, Lifestyles, and Organs
Age: An Equivocal Criterion and the Mark of a Unique Biographical Experience
Measuring Singularity
Age as a Development Marker Used in Association with Chronological Thresholds in Late Nineteenth-Century Medical Expertise
Orfila or the Experimental Biochemical Shift in Forensic Science
Lacassagne and the Hygienist Movement: Age as an Organic State, an Individual Modifier, and a Lever for the Fortification of the Population
The Progress of Ossification and the Measuring of Age in Lacassagne’s Forensic Medicine
Conclusion
Sources
Medicine and Forensic Medicine
Bibliography
4: Thinking “Quality of Life”: From Measures to Categorizations of the Human Beings
Measuring Quality of Life: A Political, Social, Medical, and Ethical Priority
“Quality of Life”: From the Social Indicators Movement to Ethics
The Evolution of Quality of Life Measures in Healthcare
A New Understanding of Quality of Life
From Measures to Categories: Quality of Life in Bioethics
Indicators of Humanity
From Human Life to Person
The Concept of “Person” and Its Ambiguities
Questioning the Person
From Ethics to Politics
A New Focus on the Person
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part II: Between Objectivization and Subjectivization: How Forensic Identification, Genomic Correction and Life Support Technologies Reshape the Frontiers Between Things, Human Person and Social Subject
5: Being Born in the Era of Genomics
Predicting
Choosing
Correcting
Conclusion
Bibliography
6: From “Technicized” Bodies to Body Technologies: The Human in Resuscitative Care, Between Objectivization and Subjectivization
Resuscitative Care in France: Ethical Questions and Legal Evolutions
Moral Interrogations
Legal Frameworks and Practices
“Technicized” Bodies: Objectivization and Therapeutic Efficacy
Metric Objectivization and the Clinical Legacy
“De-suscitation” and Therapeutic Efficacy
From “Technicized” Bodies to “Body Technologies”
Body Technologies and Relational Care
Unnecessary Technologies and Ritual Imperatives
Conclusion
References
Part III: Measurement and the Rise of New Hierarchies Between Human Beings
7: Bone Geopolitics: Bone Age and the Racialization of Growth in UK and US Pediatrics (1940–1980)
Ethnicity, Race, and Bone Age in Research and Reports on Child Growth
The 1960s: Honing the Measurement of Human Growth and Capturing Class Variations
Setting Growth Scores
Standardizing Scores and Rectifying Variations
From Class to Nation: The Dissemination of US and UK Standards and Bottom-Up Ethnicization
Monitoring Public Health or Positioning Countries Within an International Metrologic Space
“Nationalizing” Abacuses: Bottom-Up Ethnicization
Bone Age and Development Patterns in Mid-1970s International Pediatrics
The Internationalization of Biopolitics and the Geneticization of Pediatrics
Worldwide Variation in Human Growth: Mapping Genetic Growth Patterns to Tailor Global Development Policies
Reconsidering Global Child Growth Data Through the Ethnical Background Hypothesis
Beneath Social Class: The Racial Growth Pattern of African Populations
Variations Between Social Classes: The De-racialization of Europeans
Conclusion
Bibliography
8: Models of Corporeality and Controversies Around Puberty
Methodology
Medical Models of the Body in Pubertal Transition
Puberty as a Global Physical and Psychic Phenomenon
A Plurality of Corporeal Models
Capturing the Progress of Puberty Through Photography
The Counter-Models of Endocrinology and Psychology
A Controversy About the Drop of the “Normal” Age of Puberty
The Early Growth of Hairs and Breasts
The Boundaries of Normality and Medical Intervention
Visibility and Fragmentation of the Sexual Body Versus Fluidity and Mechanicality of the Hormonal Body
Conclusion
References
9: Everyone for Himself and All Together? Thinking “Race” Between Social Science, Epidemiology, and Medicine
“A Single Cell” Is Not Enough
Moving Away from Pasteur’s “Monocausal” Paradigm and from the Notion of Exposome: Why Epidemiology and Biomedical Science Must Reach Out to the Social Sciences?
The Medical Definition of a Disease Is Always a Social One
What Epistemology and Methods Should the Social Sciences Follow?
Cross-Disciplinary Findings
Conclusion: Toward New Social Classifications
References
10: Conclusion: Measurement as an Ontological Scalpel
Metrologies and Ontogenies
Early Nineteenth Century: The Revelation of Forms, Comparative Anatomy and the Quest for Origins
The Deployment of Forms: Straightening and Fortifying
Straightening Up the Body: The Direct Mechanical Action of the Environment
Fortifying the Population: The Probabilistic Chemical Action of the Environment
Genetic Mapping in the 1970s: Molecularized Bodies, Fixed Laws of Life and Individual Responsibility
The Body as Flux and the Plasticity of Human Life
Multiple Measurers and Social Contexts of Measurement
Measurement at the Meeting Point of Science, Business and Art
Combined Metrologies and Varying Measures for Diverse Contexts
Measurement as an “Ontological Scalpel”
Time, Spaces and Bodies: Producing Otherness and Differences
Animals and Things: Toward a Shift in the Making of Otherness?
Measuring to Produce Singularities and Subjectivities
Bibliography