“Sometimes an artifact can capture your imagination,” says Linker. “I felt that I needed to explain these somehow.”
That find has guided Linker to her next book, “Slouch: The Forgotten History of America’s Poor Posture Epidemic,” due out in 2020. The work examines the scientific and social preoccupation with posture in the United States that began in the late 19th century, and only faded late in the 20th. Poor posture, flat feet, and curved spines were all seen as bodily weaknesses that demanded medical attention, lest the health of individuals and the nation spiral downward.
This concern for posture “had a lot of weight and power, even though it might seem frivolous to contemporary eyes and ears,” Linker says.
Seen through a broader lens, Linker’s project frames poor posture as a non-contagious epidemic, one that “experts” feared a significant fraction of the country suffered from. Linker sees the same kind of societal concerns at work today, particularly with growing rates of obesity in the U.S. and other developing nations. Obesity, like poor posture, Linker says, can be construed as a non-contagious epidemic.
“I find the posture epidemic as a kind of a precursor to the current so-called obesity epidemic,” she says. “There was a stigma attached to slouching bodies, just as there is to obese bodies today, and I’m interested in the moral policing that comes into being through the language of medicine and science and how it permeates the culture and sets the standards for defining normality.”
Linker herself has long been interested in the body and how it is and has been observed, monitored, measured, and pathologized. Before her career in academia, she worked as a physical therapist. Posture evaluations were part of nearly every physical exam she conducted. Yet while these evaluations were intended to identify weaknesses in patients who already suffered from an injury, posture exams were once part of a universal screening process in many schools, universities, and other institutions, including the military.