Rational Fog by M. Susan Lindee

Author:M. Susan Lindee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

FIGURE 10. Pilot in Physiological Crisis: The face transformed by motion. Eugene M. Landis, The Effects of Acceleration and Their Amelioration, in E. C. Andrus et al., Advances in Military Medicine, Made by American Investigators, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), page 251, figure 33.

In these wide-ranging studies, a visual, x-ray, quantitative, biochemical, and psychosocial record of the stresses of high altitude and high-speed air travel was created as a resource for air power planning. Human subjects (soldiers, undergraduates, medical volunteers, divers, and climbers) modeled the experience of long, cold, uncomfortable, and dangerous flights. Their bodies provided guidance as engineers reconfigured cockpits and clothing for pilots and crews.

These studies at many different institutions were forms of what we might call normal science. This is the term for scientific studies undertaken within an established paradigm for understanding phenomena. The idea of “normal science” was first articulated by Thomas Kuhn in his influential 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.22 Important to the concept is the idea that scientific research commonly draws on an established, broad consensus that certain kinds of questions are important and relevant. In the case of the nascent field of aviation medicine, creating controlled human injury under laboratory conditions was clearly a matter of broad consensus.

Both the airplanes and the people placed inside them were seen as malleable. Some people might be less vulnerable to decompression sickness. Some psychological states might be controlled with drugs. And the airplane itself could be modified to reduce the damage of midrange accidents. The ultimate goal in aviation medicine was to keep pilots and crews alive and functional for as long as possible under as many conditions as possible. This would permit them to continue their bombing missions, that is, keep them healthy so that they could fly high enough and long enough to injure and kill persons on the ground in targeted areas. While the emphasis in the formal texts of aviation medicine was on the survival and safety of crews, that survival and safety by definition facilitated death and injury to others on the ground. Aviation medicine was simultaneously knowledge of healing and of injuring.

Those already grievously injured also became the focus of field research during the war, for example in Henry Beecher’s studies on the Italian front (Figure 11). Beecher (1904–1976), a Harvard anesthesiologist, was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century medicine. He wrote a widely discussed paper in the 1950s that defined the placebo effect. His papers on unethical research in the 1960s essentially launched the modern bioethics movement. He also later helped to redefine death as brain death, a policy that facilitated organ transplantation. Whatever one makes of Beecher as a person—and he was a complicated person as both Laura Stark and Susan Lederer are helping us to understand—he certainly had an impact on the practices of biomedicine.23

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