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Wellcome Collection
A PAIR of unusual gloves, belonging to 19th-century polymath Francis Galton, lie in University College London. Galton was the man who coined the term eugenics to describe beliefs and practices that aim to 鈥渋mprove鈥� the genetic quality of a human population.
His motto was 鈥渨henever you can, count鈥�, so he decided to put a pin in the thumb of his left glove and a felt pad, covered by a strip of paper, across its fingers. By touching different fingers with the pin, Galton could track the things he saw without others noticing.
One of Galton鈥檚 ideas was to assemble a beauty map of Great Britain. Women he judged to be beautiful were noted with pinpricks on one finger, while those he deemed plain were marked on another. Clearly, this wouldn鈥檛 produce a map of British physiognomic variation so much as a record of Galton鈥檚 prejudices and tastes.
In Am I Normal? The 200-year search for normal people (and why they don鈥檛 exist), Sarah Chaney uses such examples to make clear that, when it comes to society, the human body and the mind, there can be no such thing as an objective study; there is no moral or existential 鈥渙utside鈥� from which to begin one.
Chaney鈥檚 book provides an uncomfortable context for our attempts to seek norms. Most studies reflect the prejudices of their time. Take drapetomania, a 鈥渕ental illness鈥� proposed in 1851 to affect enslaved people who ran away: slave life was thought to be so pleasant that only those with mental health problems would want to escape.
It would be easy to wield such horrors against the medical and social sciences, especially since measurement has elicited little insight in some areas 鈥� note the relatively slow progress in our understanding of mental health. But given the severe symptoms of some medical conditions, do we really want to abandon our efforts to understand them?
It is true that we haven鈥檛 paid enough attention to the source and use of our data. Should we still base medicine, social policy and design largely on data from people in Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies?
Luckily, says Chaney, studies can easily be made to detect diversity instead. It just takes humility, imagination and an awareness that there may be no such thing as normal.
