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wash their hands of germs before eating, and later, to apply antiseptic salve to a cat scratch or an inflamed fingernail. Company washrooms sprouted signs admonishing employees to wash hands before returning to work, especially if they worked with food served to others. In this period, people also learned how to perform surgery that would not usually be fatal and how to link gum disease with bacteria between the teeth. |
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At the same time they learned these practices about germs, another ubiquitous set of tiny, invisible things were being negotiated and sewn into the social fabric. These were formal, commodified classifications and standards, both scientific and commercial. People classified, measured, and standardized just about everythinganimals, human races, books, pharmaceutical products, taxes, jobs, and diseases. The categories so produced lived in industry, medicine, science, education, and government. They ranged from the measurement of machine tools to the measurement of people's forearms and foreheads. The standards were sometimes physically tiny measures: how big should a standard size second of time be, an eyeglass screw, or an electrical pulse rate?
4 At other times, they were larger: what size should a railroad car be, a city street, or a corporation? Government agencies, industrial consortia, and scientific committees created the standards and category systems. So did mail-order firms, machine-tool manufacturers, animal breeders, and thousands of other actors. Most of these activities became silently embodied in the built environment and in notions of good practice. The decisions taken in the course of their construction are forever lost to the historical record. In fact, their history is considered by most to be boring, trivial, and unworthy of investigation. |
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There are some striking similarities to our own late twentieth-century historical moment in that faced by Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century. A new international information-sharing and gathering movement was starting, thanks to the advent of wide-scale international travel, international quasigovernmental governance structures, and a growing awareness that many phenomena (like epidemics and markets) would not be confined to one country. In the nineteenth century, for the first time people faced large numbers of bodies and their microbes moving rapidly across national borders and between large bureaucraciesand at an unprecedented rate. Especially in the case of epidemics, international public health became an urgent necessity. Attempts to control these passengers represent one of the first large-scale western medical classification schemes: ships that |
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