Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal

Reviewed by: Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period by Coreen McGuire Bess Williamson (bio) Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal: Setting the Standards for Disability in the Interwar Period By Coreen McGuire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 248. Historians of technology are likely to come across certain disability technologies in their general reading: prosthetic limbs feature in many histories of war and medicine, not to mention cyborgian fantasies of the posthuman. Less familiar are technologies of invisible or otherwise non-apparent disability, such as the devices that measure and, as Coreen McGuire argues, ultimately define human experiences such as deafness and "breathlessness," or shortness of breath due to a variety of conditions. The technologies in Measuring Difference, Numbering Normal are not as well-known as prosthetics, but they provide powerful examples of the interrelatedness between technology and disability. McGuire's book focuses on measurement techniques developed in Britain in the interwar period, a time of increased interest in disability due to war injuries, and in the quantification of disability as a condition of state social support. Specialized devices as well as familiar technologies such as the telephone were used to establish ranges of function considered "normal" in breath and hearing. McGuire also takes on more theoretical considerations of "Defining Disability." The first, philosophically-oriented chapter, argues that the very definitions of disease and disability are contingent on what can be measured. Three middle chapters present case studies of measurement mechanisms: the telephone as an "artificial ear" that measured deafness; the audiometer, which used similar technology to set scales of deafness and determine qualification for state benefits; and the spirometer, which measured lung capacity, a measurement that was greatly contingent on gender and class perceptions. The final chapter reveals how measurement of breath informed the design of the respirator, which became newly relevant when the mid-1900s polio epidemic prompted attempts to recreate "normal" breathing. These case studies offer detailed, thoughtful research on measurement tools, measured symptoms, and social perceptions of disability mutually constructing each other. They show how disability was defined by what could be measured, with significant implications for access to benefits and treatment. McGuire describes the "epistemic injustice" at the heart of measurement, as the biases built into measured data were then reproduced in denials of the validity of hearing loss or breathlessness that did not fit [End Page 527] those measurements. When women were less likely to be believed as breathing abnormally because they did not meet standards based on male coal miners' lung capacity, this is mechanical epistemic injustice, McGuire asserts. Her reading of breathlessness as gendered due to reference data as well as social expectations of bodily movements is nuanced and suggests many possible comparisons with illnesses such as chronic fatigue, depression, or the emerging Long COVID-19. Measuring Difference's technological histories trouble the social and medical models of disability, core concepts that the field of Disability Studies refers to in understanding the role of social attitudes, not just medical pathology, in disabled people's lives. McGuire asserts the limitations of viewing the social and medical models in opposition, as scholars and activists have done, in order to challenge medical professions as the sole holders of knowledge about disability. Indeed, McGuire's cases effectively show how technologies of measurement cannot be seen as medically or socially constructing disability, as they did both. Unfortunately, this valid point does not engage with other scholars' critical revisions of models in the last two decades. A number of writers—linking to queer and feminist studies, including STS—have reconsidered the social-medical boundary and instead offered such interventions as Alison Kafer's "relational" model. In Feminist, Queer, Crip, Kafer recognizes disability as an experience of both social attitudes and bodily experience, often with similar insurance or technology denials as the ones Mc-Guire tracks. Others who have considered disabled people's own expertise in technology, such as Aimi Hamraie or Meryl Alper, likewise do not figure in McGuire's claim that disability studies have remained fixated on a social model to the detriment of critical analysis of technology. McGuire's critique of the social model is significant for historians of technology who

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