Objectivity has often been used to refer to an ideal of scientific representation, facilitated by precise measurements and standardized instrumentation. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, clinical and research programs attempted to measure difference in human bodies and minds. Quantitative technologies and techniques that were, arguably, more “scientific” than qualitative descriptions, enabled researchers to determine more flexible “normal” ranges to juxtapose the abnormal and define parameters for creating categories of difference in disability, ability, and even race. How did quantification of difference, racially-defined deficiency, and anthropometric studies frame new epistemic authority for measuring human health? How did qualitative and quantitative indicators rely on technology and the pathological embodiment of medical surveillance? And to what extent did researchers rely on statistics and measurement to create a relationship between what they considered to be “normal” and “abnormal”? As the papers in this panel show, however, changing values about the classification of human bodies and minds relied not only on expert studies, but also on the perspectives and self-knowledge of subjects. The quantification of human hair, the commodification of phrenological self-knowledge, the pathologizing of audiometric data, the development of formal guidelines for hearing acuity, and the need to stabilize diagnostic boundaries of mental deficiency were all dependent on normative responses to the study of human difference.
