Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age

Abstract

Reviews the book, "Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age" by John C. Burnham (2009). This book tells the story of how the "accident prone" became a human kind as Ian Hacking's might say, but only briefly, and only for a limited group of professionals in the twentieth century. One fascinating chapter in the book details the resistance of psychiatrists to molding the accident-prone individual into a full-fledged disease type. Although Freudian psychoanalysts such as Karl Menninger explained some accidents as the fruits of unconscious wishes, these were seen as singular events, and not as a propensity to suffer multiple accidents. Burnham's research skills are in ample display in this volume, as he meticulously tracks the concept of the accident prone in industrial psychological and safety literature, medical accounts, and popular writings. Burnham is attentive to the many genres in each of these fields, shedding light on the ways an idea circulates through expert literatures, textbooks, and popular articles. Writing the life history of an idea does not easily yield a death date, as Burnham points out, and even now, the notion of the accident-prone person persists in popular commentary, cartoons, and even poetry. What this book ably shows is that it has already lost its short-lived scientific soul. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)