Lawrence Joseph Henderson: Bridging Laboratory and Social Life The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Munoz, Mateo Jasmine. 2014. Lawrence Joseph Henderson: Bridging Laboratory and Social Life. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274511 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, WARNING: This file should NOT have been available for downloading from Harvard University’s DASH repository. Lawrence Joseph Henderson: Bridging Laboratory and Social Life A dissertation presented by Mateo J. Muñoz to The Department of History of Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2014 © 2014–Mateo J. Muñoz All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Charles E. Rosenberg Mateo J. Muñoz Lawrence Joseph Henderson: Bridging Laboratory and Social Life Abstract This study uses the professional trajectory of the Harvard-trained physical chemist and physiologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson to show how the nascent and highly mobile interconnections between biomedicine and social theory began to crystallize around the concept of the social system in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The social system became a powerful and persuasive way of relating vastly different concepts and their consequences, e.g., the laboratory and social life. By focusing on L.J. Henderson and the social system, this study brings the history of biomedicine into dialogue with the history of the social sciences in a new and interesting way by offering an alternative (pre-cybernetics) genealogy of systems theory. This dissertation is an examination of Henderson’s cross-disciplinary application of the concept of the social system in three domains: the social sciences, medicine, and industry. Henderson is a historically interesting case because he allows us a unique point of view—the ability to see border crossings between the social sciences and the life sciences in more than one domain. I argue that the transformation of social theory in inter-war America should be understood as part of a broader set of mid-twentieth century developments in the life sciences in general, and human physiology in particular. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations v Acknowledgements vi Dedication vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE The Great Nomographer 23 CHAPTER TWO A State of Mutual Dependence: Articulating the Relationship Between Fitness and Systems 66 CHAPTER THREE Constituting a Social System: The Case of the Physician Patient Relationship 95 CHAPTER FOUR The Industrial Workplace as a Social System 123 CONCLUSION 152 BIBLIOGRAPHY 158 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS APA American Philosophical Association APS American Philosophical Society CIBP Chester I. Barnard Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University CML Countway Medical Library CWI Committee of Work in Industry DMS Division of Medical Sciences HBS Harvard Business School HFL Harvard Fatigue Laboratory HMS Harvard Medical School HUA Harvard University Archives LJHP L.J. Henderson Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University MGH Massachusetts General Hospital RAC Rockefeller Archive Center RPP Raymond Pearl Papers v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi For my parents vii INTRODUCTION Lawrence Joseph Henderson: Bridging Laboratory and Social Life tracks early- and mid- twentieth century interactions between the social sciences and the life sciences through the professional trajectory of Harvard physiologist and physical chemist Lawrence Joseph Henderson. Henderson is most clearly remembered within the history of the life sciences for conducting research and publishing papers on the regulation of acid-base equilibria in living organisms and deriving the eponymous principle of equilibrium (the Henderson-Hasselbach equation). Henderson later developed a theory of the social system, which he applied to medicine and the psycho-physiology of work. This dissertation is an examination of Henderson’s cross- disciplinary application of the concept of the social system in three domains: the social sciences, medicine, and industry. Henderson is a historically interesting case because he allows us a unique point of view—the ability to see border crossings between the social sciences and the life sciences in more than one domain. Henderson’s life provides a comparative frame for these three domains in a single figure. That itself is quite unusual, and is worth exploring. Henderson’s work assumes the existence of interdisciplinarity. Scholars have frequently looked at interdisciplinarity from the perspective of established disciplines that were once interdisciplinary fields struggling to establish themselves (biochemistry, physical chemistry, psychiatry, sociology), or from the perspective of such failed projects as human relations, human biology, or general physiology. In this case, the focus is less on success or failure in establishing a distinct discipline, and more on the nature of the border crossings. In this dissertation I use Henderson as a lens to examine the porousness of these boundaries, with the goal of understanding moments of interaction between the life sciences and the social sciences and the institutional conditions that enabled this type of movement of bodies and ideas. 1 Each chapter in this dissertation provides an analytic that allows us to learn something new about the porous boundaries between the life sciences and the social sciences in the early decades of the twentieth century. By exploring these differential border crossings between the social and the biological—within the space of industrial labor studies, within social medicine and within the social and biological sciences—we see a more robust picture of the dynamics of interdisciplinarity in the pre-war period than is generally suggested in existing histories of these fields. My secondary goal is to show that the distance between Henderson’s intellectual moment and ours is at least part of the reason why we have separated these intellectual spheres in our minds. Henderson is not an outlier, but rather an indicator to study a very different moment in time when such border crossings were actually not that difficult. Today, this kind of border crossing is considered quite difficult, largely due to existing institutional structures and disciplinary dynamics as well as professional priorities. This is made evident, for instance, in the existence of the so-called translational sciences. Translational science refers to the movement of scientific developments from bench to bedside. This study is not the first account to consider Henderson’s life and work. Other scholars have considered him and his writings, especially in the history of science. Sarah Tracy, for example, has extensively studied the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and the work of Ancel Keys, a prominent physiologist who conducted research at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory. Her interest in exercise physiology and the physiology of extremes has helped us better understand the motivations and values of these large-scale research projects in physiology and human biology.1 1 Sarah W. Tracy, “The Physiology of the Extremes: Ancel Keys and the International High Altitude Expedition of 1935,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, no. 4 (2012): 627–660. 2 Joel Isaac has focused largely on the circulation of ideas in the social sciences.2 His work has taught us much about the role institutions—especially inter-war Harvard—play in the circulation and production of social scientific knowledge and the establishment of disciplines. This dissertation will draw heavily on these important works with the goal of understanding moments of bifurcation and crossing-over between the biological and the social sciences. As such, this dissertation moves our understanding of the development of the social and biological sciences in the twentieth century into different spaces—beyond the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and beyond the Ivory tower—to the industrial workplace and the clinic. My interest in these border crossings is the very thing that brings focused attention to these different spaces. It is here that we can more clearly see the bifurcation of these domains—social science, medicine, and the industrial workplace—from different perspectives. I argue that bifurcation and crossing over are essential to understanding what was happening in these domains. As such, this study gives us a fresh look at the interface between social medicine and industry as well as the history of interdisciplinarity. Henderson is not the only person who engaged in border crossing. Henderson’s particular training and institutional location, however, enabled him to cross through domains ranging from physiology to sociology to social medicine to industrial research. Each of these domains gives new insight into the differential nature of disciplinary crossing at that particular moment in time. 2 Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universty Press, 2012). 3 The Social System Early in his career, Henderson began studying logic with the famous American philosopher Josiah Royce. The two men developed an enduring intellectual friendship that in many ways transformed Henderson’s approach to scientific inquiry. While attending Royce’s seminar