Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty

M. Murphy is Assistant Professor in the History Department and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 11. Man in a Box: Building-Machines and the Science of Comfort 192. Building Ladies into the Office Machine 353. Feminism, Surveys, and Toxic Details 574. Indoor Pollution at the Encounter of Toxicology and Popular Epidemiology 815. Uncertainty, Race, and Activism at the EPA 1116. Building Ecologies, Tobacco, and the Politics of Multiplicity 1317. How to Build Yourself a Body in a Safe Space 151Epilogue 179Bibliography 181Notes 213Index 241

“Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty is all at once about the women’s health movement, ventilation, cybernetics, virology, and chemical toxicity. It is labor history and medical history wrapped into a fiercely disputed knot. Unraveling that tangle, and using the Syndrome to tell us about who we were at the turn of the millennium, M. Murphy has written a remarkable, insightful book.”-Peter Galison, author of Einstein’s Clocks, PoincarÉ’s Maps: Empires of Time “How does an illness come into being? In this provocative study, M. Murphy takes us on a journey into the making of an environmental illness, into the spaces of the modern office building, gendered labor practices, and workers’ bodies to reveal what is perceived and what is invisible in the built environment where many Americans spend their working days. How sick buildings and indoor air pollution became visible problems in environmental health is a story that takes us far beyond the architectural history of office buildings. It takes us deep into the architecture of reality: into how we know and what we know about environmental exposures and the uncertainties they pose both to knowledge and human health.”-Gregg Mitman, author of The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950