In this chapter, Davis discusses how specialization had become an obsession. Specialization was basically when a person focuses on a particular thing or subject. For example like we discussed in class, someone can specialize not only in cancer but also in brain cancer, and that is there specialization. Davis feels that specialization can lead to obsession because a person specializing in one thing rather than several things could get so consumed in his work and in that one subject that eventually that is all he thinks about. Davis gives and example of specialization as an obsession of Sir Francis Galton, the “founder of eugenics”. Galton had been obsessed with science and it had gotten severe to the point where he would have nervous breakdowns. The example that was really interesting to me was when Davis explained how Galton actually “decided to measure human boredom by counting the number of times a group of people fidgeted”. Although this obsession must seem extremely crazy, many of the things Galton developed and created wouldn’t have come about if he wasn’t obsessed in the first place.
Finally, towards the end, Davis explains how eventually obsession seemed to have taken a turn and actually seemed normal in society and had been accepted.
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