Slouch, p.30
Slouch, page 30
Some of my best thinking happens when I am in conversation with others. Luckily, I am in a profession that fosters such dialogue through conference presentations, public lectures, and colloquiums. I presented parts of Slouch at the Barbara Bates Center for the History of Nursing, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science, Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of Medicine, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Memorial University School of Medicine, Penn’s Medical Sociology Workshop, the Penn Humanities Forum, Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science, the Science History Institute, the University of Kansas Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of the History of Medicine and Bioethics, and Yale University’s Program in the History of Science and Medicine. A collective thank you goes out to all of my colleagues at these various forums and institutions.
I have particularly appreciated my ongoing conversations and email exchanges with Michele Eodice, Mary Fissell, Nancy Hirschmann, Susan Lederer, Elizabeth Lee, Deborah Levine, Naomi Rogers, Rosemary Stevens, Jonathan Sadowsky, Thomas Schlich, Jacob Steere-Williams, Sarah Tracy, Arleen Tuchman, Keith Wailoo, John Warner, Elizabeth Watkins, and Bess Williamson. For written responses to various chapters presented in this book, I am grateful to Jonathan Marks, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Dominque Tobbell, Michael Rembis, Jenifer Barclay, Brigid Prial, and Carla Bittel. Mara Mills, Jaipreet Virdi, and Sarah Rose, co-editors of a forthcoming Osiris issue, gave me the chance to test run my thinking on epidemics and disability. Christine von Oertzen, Elaine Leong, and Carla hosted me at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, providing comments on multiple rounds of an article detailing Clelia Mosher’s posture measuring device.
In the project’s early stages, Susan Reverby read the first four chapters of the manuscript and offered me essential feedback and words of encouragement. More recently, Wendy Kline and Jaipreet helped me bring the book across the finish line, taking the time to read the entire manuscript and assuring me that it was good to go.
I have had the good fortune to be represented by an incredible agent, Jessica Papin. Thank you for taking a chance on me. My editor, Eric Crahan, expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the project since day one and has expertly stewarded it through peer review and production. Thanks also to Whitney Rauenhorst, Alyssa Sanford, David Heath, and to the team at Princeton University Press.
Family and friends, near and far, have fed my soul, showing me that there is more to life than “the book.” My Sunday phone conversations with my mother, Rose Anne O’Donnell, keep me righted; I am blessed to call her Mom. Jess Frey, Jeanne Alvaré Goodwin, Anjali Shaw, and Audrey Yu are steadfast confidantes who have seen me through thick and thin. I would be remiss if I did not thank my physical therapists Marc McShane and Amy Lesher, who kept me not only physically intact, but also up to date on the latest theories regarding posture testing and training in the clinic.
My greatest debt goes to my own family. I faced some life-threatening health events during the course of writing this book. At one point, I wasn’t even sure that I would recuperate enough to be able to research and write again. My spouse, Damon Linker, stood by my side through it all, helping to get me back on my feet, and once I was, did everything in his power to make sure that I had the space and time (and meals!) to see this project through. He is my intellectual companion, life partner, and love. The book is dedicated to my children, Mark and Katie Rose, who are my life’s finest works. This project has matured alongside them as they have grown into discerning young adults whose love for culture, ideas, music, and the human psyche makes me indescribably proud. These pages are for you.
Illustration Credits
FIGURE 1. From Dudley J. Morton, “Human Origin: Correlation of Previous Studies of Primate Feet and Posture with Other Morphologic Evidence,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 10, no. 1 (1927): 183.
FIGURE 2. K. Frances Scott, A College Course in Hygiene (New York: Macmillan Co., 1939), 15.
FIGURE 3. “Other 25—National Negro Health Week,” Afro-American (Baltimore, MD), April 3, 1937, 18.
FIGURE 4. Courtesy of the R. Tait McKenzie Papers, University of Pennsylvania, Box 4, Folder 76.
FIGURE 5. Jessie H. Bancroft, The Posture of School Children: With Its Home Hygiene and New Efficiency Methods for School Training (New York: Macmillan Co., 1913), 99.
FIGURE 6. Jessie H. Bancroft, The Posture of School Children: With Its Home Hygiene and New Efficiency Methods for School Training (New York: Macmillan Co., 1913), 162.
FIGURE 7. “Incorrect Sitting Position for Postural Deformity and Dorsal Curvature Cases,” photograph, Library of Congress Catalogue, https://lccn.loc.gov/2018677185.
FIGURE 8. “Posture and Tuberculosis,” 1920, National Child Welfare Association, cooperating with National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis; from Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2014647542/.
FIGURE 9. Courtesy of Stanford University Archives and Special Collections.
FIGURE 10. From Lillian C. Drew, Individual Gymnastics: A Handbook of Corrective and Remedial Gymnastics (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1922), 80.
FIGURE 11. Roger I. Lee and Lloyd T. Brown, “A New Chart for the Standardization of Body Mechanics,” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery 21, no. 5 (1923): 754.
FIGURE 12. Image from John Daly McCarthy, Health and Efficiency (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1922), 53.
FIGURE 13. Theresa Wolfson, “Seating Survey in the Garment Industry,” in Seating and Posture: An Inquiry Made by the Joint Board of Sanitary Control into the Seating Conditions in the Women’s Garment Industry (1923), 45.
FIGURE 14. From M. J. Pullman, Foot Hygiene and Posture: For Adults and Children (Los Angeles: 1933), 22.
FIGURE 15. Photograph in Herman W. Marshall, “What Do You Know about Feet?,” Boot and Shoe Recorder (April 15, 1922): 110, courtesy of the Anglican Church of Melanesia and the British Museum.
FIGURE 16. From M. J. Pullman, Foot Hygiene and Posture: For Adults and Children (Los Angeles: 1933), 28.
FIGURE 17. Display Advertisement for B. F. Goodrich Rubberized “Posture Foundation” Sport Shoes, Ladies’ Home Journal 54, no. 6 (June 1937): 94.
FIGURE 18. Display Advertisement for Buster Brown Shoes, Parents Magazine 5, no. 10 (October 1930): 75.
FIGURE 19. Antioch College, The Effects of Modern Shoes upon Proper Body Mechanics, 1924–1931 (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch College, 1931), 5.
FIGURE 20. Antioch College, The Effects of Modern Shoes upon Proper Body Mechanics, 1924–1931 (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch College, 1931), 12.
FIGURE 21. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 11, 1935, 11.
FIGURE 22. “Expert Adjustment with One Movement,” Display Advertisement, Corset and Underwear Review 14, no. 5 (February 1920): 52.
FIGURE 23. “Camco Corset,” Corset and Underwear Review 19, no. 5 (August 1922): cover.
FIGURE 24. From A Manual of Camp Physiological Supports, 6th ed. (Jackson, MI: S. H. Camp and Company, n.d.): 33.
FIGURE 25. “Camp,” Display Advertisement, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, May 4, 1941, 16A.
FIGURE 26. “Fitness Program Seen Adding Importance to Posture Week,” Women’s Wear Daily 70, no. 57 (March 22, 1945): 17.
FIGURE 27. William Blaikie, How to Get Strong and How to Stay So (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879), 225.
FIGURE 28. Jessie H. Bancroft, The Posture of School Children: With Its Home Hygiene and New Efficiency Methods for School Training (New York: Macmillan Co., 1913), 235.
FIGURE 29. Courtesy of the Massachusetts General Hospital Archives and Special Collections (subject file Orthopedic Department), Boston, Massachusetts.
FIGURE 30. From Bess M. Mensendieck, The Mensendieck System of Functional Exercises (Portland, ME: Southworth-Anthoensen Press, 1937), plate X.
FIGURE 31. L. Joseph Cahn, “Use of a Museum in Hygiene Class,” Journal of Health and Physical Education 12, no. 1 (1941): 6.
FIGURE 32. Courtesy of Smith College Archives, Physical Education Department Records, Dorothy Ainsworth files, unprocessed, restricted, Box 1.
FIGURE 33. Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, December 20, 1927, 21, courtesy of the Rochester Museum and Science Center.
FIGURE 34. W.A.C. Field Manual: Physical Training (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 119.
FIGURE 35. Courtesy of Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, Massachusetts.
FIGURE 36. “Finishing School: Wealthiest Families Send Children in Highly-Rated Palmer to Become Ladies and Gentlemen,” Ebony Magazine, October 1947, 22.
FIGURE 37. Courtesy of the Hennepin County Library.
FIGURE 38. Vassar Chronicle, April 15, 1950, 7.
FIGURE 39. Courtesy of Princeton University Archives, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
Notes
Introduction
1. Ron Rosenbaum, “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal: How Scientists Coaxed America’s Best and Brightest out of Their Clothes,” New York Times Magazine, January 15, 1995, 26, 28–29, 30–31, 40, 46, 55–56.
2. Important exceptions include Sander L. Gilman, Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture (London: Reaktion Books, 2018), as well as Patricia Vertinsky, “Physique as Destiny: William H. Sheldon, Barbara Honeyman Heath and the Struggle for Hegemony in the Science of Somatotyping,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 24, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 291–316.
3. Rosenbaum, “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal.”
4. Patricia Marx, “Stand Up Straight!,” New Yorker, March 29, 2021, 30. This number indicates the global market, not just the United States. See “Posture Correction Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report by Distribution Channel (Pharmacies & Retail Stores, E-Commerce), by Product (Sitting Support Devices, Kinesiology Tape), by End Use, by Region, and Segment Forecasts, 2022–2030,” accessed April 11, 2023, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/posture-correction-market-report, and “Posture Corrector Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast (2022–2029),” accessed April 11, 2023, https://www.maximizemarketresearch.com/market-report/posture-corrector-market/146092/.
5. Lloyd T. Brown, “The Harvard Slouch,” New York Times, March 18, 1917, T8.
6. For more on the pre–nineteenth-century understanding of posture, especially in Europe, see Gilman, Stand Up Straight!
7. Tom Gundling, “Stand and Be Counted: The Neo-Darwinian Synthesis and the Ascension of Bipedalism as an Essential Hominid Synapomorphy,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 34, no. 1/2 (December 2012): 185–210. For a history of skull collecting, see Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
8. Bert Theunissen, Eugène Dubois and the Ape-Man from Java: The History of the First Missing Link and Its Discoverer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).
9. For one example, see Arthur Keith, “Hunterian Lectures on Man’s Posture: Its Evolution and Disorders (Lecture I),” British Medical Journal 1, no. 3246 (March 1923): 451–54.
10. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).
11. Nancy Tomes, “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” American Journal of Public Health 90, no. 2 (February 2000): 191–98; Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
12. Joel E. Goldthwait, “An Anatomic and Mechanistic Concept of Disease,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 172, no. 24 (July 1915): 888. Views such as Goldthwait’s were relatively common. For the history of holism in U.S. medicine, see Sarah W. Tracy, “George Draper and American Constitutional Medicine, 1916–1946: Reinventing the Sick Man,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 53–89.
13. R. Tait McKenzie, “The Regulation of Physical Instruction in Schools and Colleges from the Standpoint of Hygiene,” Science 29, no. 743 (March 1909): 482.
14. Beth Linker, “Toward a History of Ableness,” All of Us, June 1, 2021, http://allofusdha.org/research/toward-a-history-of-ableness/.
15. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
16. Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33–57; Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
17. Michael Rembis, “Disability and the History of Eugenics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, ed. Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 85–103. See also David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic: Race, Disability, and the Making of an International Eugenic Science, 1800–1945,” Disability & Society 18, no. 7 (December 1, 2003): 843–64.
18. Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
19. Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Alexandra Minna Stern, “From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and Science in Mexico, 1920–1960,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 187–210. For more on the history of euthenics, see Susan Currell, “Eugenic Decline and Recovery in Self-Improvement Literature of the Thirties,” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, ed. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 44–69.
20. The history of posture improvement campaigns served much the same purpose as other hygiene efforts in the American colonial project. See, for example, Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
21. This was a trend found in other nations as well. See, for example, Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
22. Beth Linker and Emily K. Abel, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Disease History: Tuberculosis and Its Past,” in Civil Disabilities, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Beth Linker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 83–102.
23. Riva Lehrer, Golem Girl: A Memoir (New York: One World, 2020); Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (New York: New Press, 2017).
24. The scholarship on the history of obesity is extensive. For some examples, see Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Sander L. Gilman, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); and Anna Mollow, “Disability Studies Gets Fat,” Hypatia 30, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 199–216.
25. Roy Porter, “Diseases of Civilization,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1993), 585; Charles E. Rosenberg, “Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civilization as Risk,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 714–30.
26. Charles E. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). For a critical take on the narrative logic of epidemics, see Mary E. Fissell et al., “Introduction: Reimagining Epidemics,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 543–61, and the articles contained in the remainder of this themed issue that problematize such a view.
27. For more on slavery and disability, see Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020); Jenifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021); Dea Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2012).
28. Shaun Dreisbach, “How to Turn Off Your Bitch Switch,” Glamour, February 2016, 96.
29. A version of Brody’s article appeared in print on December 29, 2015, on page D5 of the New York edition, with the headline: “Good Posture May Better Your Position.” For Black jurors, see Adam Liptak, “Exclusion of Blacks from Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny,” New York Times, August 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/politics/exclusion-of-blacks-from-juries-raises-renewed-scrutiny.html.
