A rapid PBL that probes the Protestant reformation, pellagra studies of the 1910s, and promises of the internet

In this session I want to:

Process: During the first hour, read the three exhibits below, use the internet to follow any leads or angles that emerge for you, and prepare to give a spoken report (5-minutes incl. discussion) to the group at the end of an hour. Grab my attention if you want more coaching. Optional extra: Paste your written notes at the end or email them to me to paste in.

#1. Sydenstricker and Goldberger established the cause and cure of pellagra in the 1910s, but the very methods they were able to use created biases and, in Goldberger's case, precedents that had costs. Here is an annotation of an article about research that Sydenstricker conducted.
  • Marks, H. M. (2003). “Epidemiologists Explain Pellagra: Gender, Race, and Political Economy in the Work of Edgar Sydenstricker.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 58(1): 34-55.
  • Goldberger, a US Public Health Service doctor who showed the connection between diet and pellagra through observation and experiments with a prison population, also worked with Sydenstricker in the mid-1910s to show the association in data derived from 7 mill towns in S. Carolina. The association was clear against income per adult male equivalent (with nutritional needs of wives and children set lower). They did not go beyond this statistic to examine distribution within households and shed no light the higher incidence of pellagra among women. In subsequent work on sharecroppers and tenant farmers in Mississippi, Sydenstricker examined the annual and debt-related restriction on food supply but made no distinction between whites and blacks and shed no light on the disproportionate incidence of pellagra among blacks. Marks concludes that, by distracting attention from gender and racial inequalities, “research methods and traditions, no less than overt ideologies, played a role in maintaining the subordinate social position of women and African-Americans in the southern United States” (p.34). There is more to Marks' account, including the more pluralistic idea of race in the areas of high immigration in the industrial Northern USA.

#2. In a recent blog post I "invite digging deeper into analysis of the social currents that produce at the same time the evolving internet, the promotion of the internet in terms of a Big Transition in Society, and fundamentalist denunciation of all readings of the text except that of one's church."

#3. The blog post was informed by my having read Burning to Read, which presents the Protestant reformation and access to printed text in the vernacular as the origins of fundamentalism, as described in the second paragraph of this review.

Written notes from PBL inquiries

To paste in your notes, click on the edit button, scroll down to the bottom, paste in the notes, then click on the save button (above to the right).
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E. Morozov, The Net Delusion:
"the dangerous fascination with solving previously intractable social problems with the help of technology allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom and liberation."
-> Q: Were exponents of the vernacular in 1500s also disguising vested interests?
Reviewer of Morozov (NY Times 6 Feb 2011): "Too often the morally malleable Web has the effect of crushing community under the weight of bad pluralisms and atrocious diversities. In that regard, the Internet is creating an egalitarian antidemocracy in which the strongest inhumanity tramples on the most eloquent rationality and decency." -> Q: From what position does the reviewer make these judgements? Is he assuming a democracy of good-taste citizens that excludes the rabble?


(peter)