Journal of the History of Biology (2015) 48:361–364 DOI 10.1007/s10739-015-9411-x

Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Introduction – Special Section: Harvard Fatigue Laboratory

VANESSA HEGGIE University of Birmingham Birmingham UK E-mail: [email protected]

It is a pleasure to introduce the following three papers, which all take as their shared theme an interest in the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, an unusual collaboration between a medical school and a business school. The Laboratory ran for 20 years during a turbulent time in American history – from two years before the Wall Street Crash to two years after the end of WWII – and is known best for its work on fatigue and extreme physiology. As Johnson (2014, p. 5) points out, this institution is overdue a revisit by historians – not just of science and technology, but of America, of masculinity, and of economics. All three papers in this special section of the Journal of the History of Biology effectively demonstrate the ‘long reach’ of the Fatigue Laboratory (Chapman, 1990). This phrase, used to describe the influence the laboratory had on the interrelated disciplines of industrial, exercise, and extreme physiology, is here shown to be true too for labor relations, psychology and military science. Perhaps more importantly, this section uses the Fatigue Laboratory as a lens through which we can refocus our histories of twentieth century experimental biology. As well as providing new assessments of a seminal research institution and its many employees, supporters, subjects, funders, and detractors, these papers each also provide a corrective for existing stories about biology, physiology, or experiment in the early twentieth century. Scheffler (2014) reclaims a loss: the decline of ‘fatigue’ as a tangible physical phenomenon. This tends to be explained – and I have taught this story myself – as a result of the rise of industrial psychology in the 1930s and 1940s, displacing physiology as a means to explain, control, and legislate for, fatigue in the workplace. My future courses will teach a different story, one in which, as Scheffler demonstrates, it is

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the Fatigue Laboratory’s intellectual commitments (to the steady state hypothesis) and methodological practices (the use of scholars and sportsmen in its laboratory, rather than workers), which itself changed the concept of fatigue as an object of scientific scrutiny and legislative debate. The reasons for the Fatigue Laboratory’s long reach beyond academic science are in part explained in Oakes’ (2015) study of the Harvard Committee on Industrial Physiology (CIP), a cross-disciplinary research group with strong links to the Laboratory. Created by the intersection of the work of Professor of Industrial Management George ‘Elton’ Mayo, and medical scientist Lawrence J. Henderson, the CIP hoped to influence the training of America’s future elites, to shape the sociology as well as the physiology of industry, and to create leaders in business and government. While the CIP may have emphasised its role in ‘basic’ rather than ‘applied’ research, the external connections between its work and the broader American economy and political sphere are clear. What should not be overlooked is the importance of alliances and connections within the university; Oakes’ paper also demonstrates the influence of universities’ administrative structures, funding priorities, and management in the production of knowledge, as well as the training of future elites. While the Fatigue Laboratory drew conclusions about the working conditions of industrial labourers, the CIP also contributed to the development of a specific form of education – the case-study system – that was gradually introduced into the Harvard Business School. Johnson’s (2014) story is one in which researchers grapple with the challenges of the most obstreperous experimental object: man. On the one hand the Fatigue Laboratory offered a hyper-rational justification for the use of laboratory staff as subjects: it was so that ‘trained subjects’ could be used to successfully perform complicated or exhausting experimental tasks. Likewise ‘known subjects’ were an advantage, as data about their weight, blood, respiratory function and so on had already been gathered or generated, so each new study added to, and could draw from, that data. Known subjects also function as tools for standardization – the same body tested across a range of laboratory and field sites, provides a consistency to the long-term output of a research programme that focuses on human guinea pigs. On the other, less pragmatic hand, this self-experimentation also provides important moral claims; it is the arduous nature of tests that proves the authority and dedication of the experimenter (not to mention his robust and energetic masculinity), and through that the authenticity and validity of his conclusions.

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What should become clear from reading these papers is that they are tied together by more than just a single institution; while each work makes a strong central argument, outlined above, through all three is threaded a common set of interests and ideas. Homeostasis is important, a concept that was developed from Claude Bernard’s milieu inte´rieur and popularised in the 1930s by the physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Chair of the Department of Physiology. Homeostasis and associated ideas of holism, of studying ‘the whole man’ occur repeatedly, and seem to bleed over into Pareto’s suggestion that ‘‘society existed in a state of equilibrium characterized by the mutual dependence of all parts’’ (Scheffler, 2014, p. 12). Similarly there is a thread that highlights the interdependence of the laboratory and the field; further, of the body and society – Johnson argues that the Fatigue Laboratory work constituted a distinct research theme that managed to consider the whole body, while still ‘‘relying upon reductionist techniques to measure human beings’’ (Johnson, 2014, p. 32). In the social, political and economic, as well as the medical and biological, sciences, the concept of homeostasis and of systems of interdependence problematized reductive research programmes that insisted complexity could be broken down and understood as the sum of its parts. This is not a new idea in biology, of course, but as these papers show it intersected in powerful ways with support for, and critique of, capitalism, labor policies, economic theory and even the performance of masculine identities. This special section acts to challenge another binary in the history of biology and medical science, as these wide influences occurred despite the participants’ insistence on a division between their ‘basic’ research, and anything ‘applied’ (Oakes, 2015). Given that Henderson also led the introduction of history of science into Harvard’s curriculum, it should not surprise us to find that the long reach of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory extends into our field as well as physiology, sociology and political science.

References Chapman, Carleton B. 1990. ‘The Long Reach of Harvard’s Fatigue Laboratory, 1926– 1947.’ Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 34(1): 17–33. Johnson, Andi. 2014. ‘‘‘They Sweat for Science’: The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and Self-Experimentation in American Exercise Physiology.’’ Journal of the History of Biology. doi:10.1007/s10739-014-9387-y.

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Oakes, Jason. 2014. ‘‘Alliances in Human Biology: The Harvard Committee on Industrial Physiology, 1929–1939.’’ Journal of the History of Biology. doi: 10.1007/s10739-014-9396-x. Scheffler, Robin Wolfe. 2014. ‘‘The Power of Exercise and the Exercise of Power: The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, Distance Running, and the Disappearance of Work, 1919–1947.’’ Journal of the History of Biology. doi:10.1007/s10739-014-9392-1.