{"id":5101,"date":"2024-04-26T09:01:35","date_gmt":"2024-04-26T09:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=5101"},"modified":"2024-04-26T09:24:01","modified_gmt":"2024-04-26T09:24:01","slug":"beth-linker-is-turning-good-posture-on-its-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=5101","title":{"rendered":"Beth Linker is Turning Good Posture On its Head"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A historian and sociologist of science re-examines the \u201cposture panic\u201d of the last century. You\u2019ll want to sit down for this.<\/p>\n

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For decades, the idea of standing properly upright carried considerable political and social baggage. Slouching was considered a sign of decay.<\/p>\n

In the early 20th century, posture exams became mainstays in the military, the workplace and schools, thanks in part to the American Posture League, a group of physicians, educators and health officials that formed in 1914. In 1917, a study found that roughly 80 percent of Harvard\u2019s freshman class had poor posture.<\/a> Industrialists piled on with posture-enhancing chairs, products and gadgets.<\/p>\n

But the actual science doesn\u2019t support the conventional wisdom about proper posture, Beth Linker argues in her new book, \u201cSlouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.\u201d Dr. Linker, a historian and sociologist of science at the University of Pennsylvania, recently sat for an interview with The New York Times; the conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.<\/p>\n

Nice to meet you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Your posture looks pretty good. And it doesn\u2019t matter \u2014 that\u2019s the whole point of my book. It\u2019s fake news.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Our obsession with great posture is fake news? I\u2019m off the hook!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Concern for posture, as a matter of etiquette, has been around since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, but poor posture did not become a scientific and medical obsession until after the publication of Darwin\u2019s \u201cOn the Origin of Species\u201d in 1859. He posited that humans evolved through natural selection, and that the first thing to develop was bipedalism; in other words, standing upright preceded brain development.<\/p>\n

This idea was controversial because convention taught that higher intellect distinguished humans from nonhuman animals, and now it appeared that only a mere physical difference, located in the spine and feet, separated humankind from the apes.<\/p>\n

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Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into<\/a>\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe<\/a>\u00a0for all of The Times.<\/p>\n

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A historian and sociologist of science re-examines the \u201cposture panic\u201d of the last century. You\u2019ll want to sit down for this.For decades, the idea of standing properly upright carried considerable political and social baggage. Slouching was considered a sign of decay.In the early 20th century, posture exams became mainstays in the military, the workplace and schools, thanks in part to the American Posture League, a group of physicians, educators and health officials that formed in 1914. In 1917, a study found that roughly 80 percent of Harvard\u2019s freshman class had poor posture. Industrialists piled on with posture-enhancing chairs, products and gadgets.But the actual science doesn\u2019t support the conventional wisdom about proper posture, Beth Linker argues in her new book, \u201cSlouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.\u201d Dr. Linker, a historian and sociologist of science at the University of Pennsylvania, recently sat for an interview with The New York Times; the conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.Nice to meet you.Your posture looks pretty good. And it doesn\u2019t matter \u2014 that\u2019s the whole point of my book. It\u2019s fake news.Our obsession with great posture is fake news? I\u2019m off the hook!Concern for posture, as a matter of etiquette, has been around since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, but poor posture did not become a scientific and medical obsession until after the publication of Darwin\u2019s \u201cOn the Origin of Species\u201d in 1859. He posited that humans evolved through natural selection, and that the first thing to develop was bipedalism; in other words, standing upright preceded brain development.This idea was controversial because convention taught that higher intellect distinguished humans from nonhuman animals, and now it appeared that only a mere physical difference, located in the spine and feet, separated humankind from the apes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5103,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5101"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5104,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5101\/revisions\/5104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}