Pub Date : 2020-08-11DOI: 10.7765/9781526143167.00013
Coreen Mcguire
During one of the Life of Breath project research meetings in 2018, consultant Dr Sara Booth recounted the story of a school teacher who felt such pressure to consistently hold her stomach in when standing in front of the class that her subsequent propensity to breathe costally (from her chest) impacted on her ability to breathe in fully – with the result that her respiratory problems were exacerbated. As I sat listening to Dr Booth talk, I wondered: how much does such lived experience of being a woman in the world impact on the ability to fill our lungs? Are we not taking our fair share of air? I argue here that we must also consider how life experiences might impact on respiration. The way that we experience breathlessness is moderated by both the mind and the body. Furthermore, levels of breathlessness cannot be consistently linked to discrete phases of illness.1 Yet attempts to capture this experience with objective measures such as those offered by spirometry have obscured this multidimensional quality.2 As a result, the measurement of breathlessness in a strictly medical paradigm has privileged the physiological symptoms of breathlessness in a way that fails to account for the lived experience of the patient.3 Increasingly, researchers have demonstrated disconnect between the subjective individuality of breathlessness and its numerical correlation.4 In this chapter I argue that considering the history of the measurement of breathlessness sheds light on this recurring disjunct between objective and subjective measures. This chapter explores how the drive to translate breathlessness into quantifiable, scalable measures has been influenced by complex historical interactions between medical expertise, industrial interests and compensation schemes. Considering these historical interactions highlights the related processes by which we have variously decided which groups counted as medically
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Pub Date : 2020-08-11DOI: 10.7765/9781526143167.00012
Coreen Mcguire
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 umbrellastyle 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
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