Abstract This essay examines how the interplay between diagnostic machines and patient experience reshaped the meaning of testing validity, through a 1926 malpractice lawsuit in colonial Shanghai. It traces how complaints of dizziness, a seemingly mundane side effect of new glasses, escalated into a legal and epistemic dispute over the validity of a vision test. Weaving together competing perspectives presented in court, the essay uncovers discrepancies between the examiner’s observations, the machine’s readings and the patient’s embodied experience. These clashes expose the fragility of the new regime of ‘scientific testing’ in the global city of Shanghai, which claimed authority from the emerging profession of optometry and a diagnostic machine known as the retinoscope. The case, I argue, marks an inflection point in the history of testing, as patient experience was recalibrated through new machines, re-legitimized in novel ways, and transformed into a generative feature of diagnostic practice itself.
This paper uses the introduction at the US Food and Drug Administration of dose-response extrapolation for ascertaining toxicity between 1950 and 1980 to analyse the negotiations between statistical knowledge and regulation. Those statistical methods enabled experimental results to be translated into a 'safe dose' of a substance for human consumption, but different methods continued to give different estimates of effects, and there was little basis for determining which methods were most accurate. I argue that statisticians were not proposing their discipline so much as a tool for mechanical decision making than as a set of methods for establishing a regulatory procedure that made assumptions and judgements visible. Consequently, their use did not bring debates about low-dose toxicity to a close even as they promoted a regulatory ethos and enabled regulators to act, even in cases of inherent uncertainty and inescapable variability.
What happens when we take the big picture to its spatial zenith and examine histories of science from the vantage point of outer space? The answer is somewhat messy. The satellite era launched alongside Sputnik 1 in 1957 facilitated the extension of scientific order and control through technologies of planetary surveillance. Yet regimes of disorder and fragmentation that emerged through entanglements of anthropogenic and more-than-human natural forces at the planetary periphery prompt a reconsideration of the limits of that control. Enrolling the methodologies of envirotech and discard studies scholarship invites a generatively messy, vertical and extra-planetary view of scientific practices and politics from the ground up and back again, and a glimpse at the historiographical possibilities that emerge from an embrace of systemic disorder.
