Manipulating Airs

This session examines the history of technological efforts to manipulate airs in the eighteenth-twentieth centuries. In particular, the four panelists discuss institutional efforts to control and improve air in prisons and hospitals, industrial efforts to re-define air as a powerful and productive substance, and cultural understandings of breath and breathing as a component of what it means to be human. Efforts to analyze, measure, and manipulate the aerial environment have frequently engaged historians of science, who have ably analyzed the medical history of respiration and the emergence of pneumatic chemistry and medicine. This session proposes to further this work both chronologically and thematically. The first paper will discuss how prison reform in the mid-eighteenth century focused on the need for improved ventilation technology and architecture. The second paper will examine the role of air in the sanitary reform of naval hospitals, emphasizing the role of female nurses. The third paper will highlight how later nineteenth-century ideas about the practical and commercial uses of air mirrored discussions surrounding “invisible fluids” like electricity. The final paper will examine the controversy surrounding medical ventilators, whose method of forcing air into an unconscious body was accepted for animals long before it was accepted for human beings. This session brings together scholars of early modern and modern science, medicine, and technology in order to illuminate how air and the aerial environment was implicated in discourses surrounding discipline and reform, gender and the body, and the boundary between animal and human.