Introduction

This book is about the application of science to one area of public decision making, the determination of water quality. It is a universal concern, though one which has until recently seemed unproblematic to most of us in the industrialized west. The quality of our water was one of those things we had forgotten how to worry about; we could rely, we felt, on the authority of our authorities: on the bacteriologists and engineers with their cultures and chlorine, on the managers and lawyers who would ensure that enough good water continued to reach us. Many things now threaten that trust: a new generation of toxic wastes, growing demand for water in arid regions, the prospect of changing climate and, in the United Kingdom, the sale of water supplies to private investors. All these matters have become public issues and no longer do we assume that good and safe water will always come from the tap. Some buy bottled water, an ironic throwback to the days of the water carrier, others equip their taps with the newest in domestic filters, an appliance common in the nineteenth century, others drink anything but water, a practice that spurred nineteenth century temperance reformers to insist that public authorities provide good, pure water for all.

We are thus at the end of a period of sanguine ignorance, and water has become another of the many aspects of our world in which we fear crisis. To resolve such questions we look to technical solutions, but when we look to those who usually supply such authority we find some who reassure us that all will be well and others who seem bent on deepening our anxiety. Thrust into the midst of technical controversies on matters about which we know little, we are left to worry both about the supposed dangers themselves and about the rationality of our fear.

The trust which we once had for our water and for many other aspects of our environment was an achievement of the great public

health campaign of the last two centuries. Beginning in the late 1830s what would become the modern system of public health administration began to take shape in Britain. Among numerous other aspects of the natural and social environment, provision of safe water came to be seen as a responsibility of government. While at the beginning of the century water came from rivers, springs, or shallow wells (or, in the case of the wealthy, from the mains of private water companies), by its end it came through mains, often owned by municipal governments, from the reservoirs constructed by them at great expense.^[1]

The trust we had come to hold was due not only to the water itself, but to the scientific authority that sanctioned that water, to those who certified that it would be pure and plentiful. The nineteenth century was also a time of massive growth of science, of its clear emergence as a profession and, most importantly here, of its utilization in public decision-making. Scientists defined long-term possibilities, rationalized the running of the ship of state, grappled with technical complexities in a way which no government of amateurs possibly could.

In most accounts, the growth of science, the provision of public services like water supplies, and the recognition of responsibility for the health of the public have been closely integrated within a network of mutual cause and effect, together constituting social progress. The public health movement was touted as the scientific answer to the grave urban problems of the day, and the subsequent progress of public health administration, from Edwin Chadwick to John Simon, and on to Simon's late-century successors, is seen as a transformation guided by science (at least in the cases where the experts were not stymied by the cheeseparing bureaucrats of the Treasury).^[2] Thus the number of scientists grew because more were needed and they became professionalized as they became social authorities, on whose word matters of individual liberty, public policy, and the distribution of vast capital were decided.

In fact, however, while we have good accounts of some aspects of sanitary science^[3] and good accounts of public health administration^[4] , we know relatively little about how science guided public health;^[5] we have mainly the claims of administrators that theirs were scientific administrations.

Water analysis is an ideal area for exploring the relations between science and public health administration for water matters are so central in the story of sanitary achievement. The drinking of what

was little better than dilute sewage at the beginning of the century led to repeated invasions of cholera and typhoid, and to the famous mid-century investigations of John Snow and William Budd, who demonstrated the link between bad water and outbreaks of these diseases. Science, in the form of bacteriology, is held to have finally resolved the problem, as the great Robert Koch and his disciples quickly detected the microorganisms responsible for these diseases in the early 1880s.

Informed public policy then became possible. The bacteriological enlightenment is thus seen as the great watershed in environmental medicine, separating a pre-scientific period in which medicine could offer little more than a false cultural authority from the contemporary period of scientific precision where the authority is real. It has been, both for writers and readers of histories of public health, the occasion for a sigh of relief: safety at last.^[6]

For reasons I develop below, I believe this is an unsatisfactory depiction, as much in its inconsistency with the historical record as in its perspective toward the relations of science, social concerns, and public policy. The story of the relations between science and public health was more complicated and contingent, a matter more of the opportune intersection of these two contexts than of their co-evolution. First science: for most of the nineteenth century Britain was not an easy place to live for non well-to-do people who wished to occupy themselves with basic scientific research. Even if one were lucky enough to secure a professorship of some sort, such a position was likely to be more important as an index of prestige and a basis for further contacts than for the income that came with it. Some scientists did live fairly well, but they did so by stringing together a number of remunerative posts: as consultants, witnesses, authors, entrepreneurs, as well as teachers. Most of the chemists, who are the main characters of this book, had such careers. As well as actual products (e.g. electroplating works), or services (e.g. fertilizer analysis), they hoped to sell authority: they would become members of Coleridge's clerisy, the profession on which society depended for the cultural authority over certain problems, and they claimed an epistemic warrant for that status.^[7] In connection with the determination of the medicinal qualities of mineral waters, chemists had been fighting for such status in matters of water quality long before the quality of public water supplies became an issue in the 1820s.

Thus part of the story is one of aggressive and successful discipline-promotion, the struggle of a group of experts to acquire

authority, regardless of the state of their art at the time. We might be tempted to see them as charlatans, for prior to the 1890s they were claiming to be analysing waters without (as we know now) any correct (or even very definite) idea of what components or contaminants of waters had active effects. Yet just as historians have come to recognize that the quack doctor played an important social role, and sold his patients what was to them a real service, so too we need to recognize that the authority sold by these chemists was a real and a valued commodity.^[8]

The second context, of public health, is more complicated. Many historians would probably agree that the history of the efforts of governments to safeguard health belongs at least as much to the history of ideas, of politics, and of social policy, as it does to the history of applied science. Yet too frequently we assume that public health improvement was a coherent enterprise, its scope well-defined, its goals clear, with minor disagreements occasionally existing only as to means. Water policy has been seen in this context. Knowing what we do of the relations between pure water and disease and (until recently) confident in the universality and obviousness of the arrangements of our society for supplying water, it is hard to see the securing of better water as anything other than an obvious and essential way of lowering mortality. Yet what social actions were necessary, and equally what standards would apply to water, were continually matters of conflict. Thus the achievement in public health was a genuinely political achievement, forged from a peculiar assortment of ideology, institutions, political circumstance, and perceptions of nature. Science, because it was expected to yield a single correct answer to any question, was an ideal to which to appeal for legitimacy, but people with opposing proposals could summon it, and in most cases it supplied them with predictions and assessments suitable for advancing their proposals. It was an idiom for argument, and a way of discovering arguments, much less than a way of resolving them.

In water analysis, for example, even after the coming of bacteriology, the patterns of activity and even of innovations reflect the history of the politics of water supply, not the history of epidemiological recognition of water-borne diseases. It is true that the question that analysts were to answer was one of what would be the effects on health of consuming certain waters. Yet their answers meant as much with regard to control of public water supplies as they did with regard to informing consumers or doctors whether their water was safe to drink. To persuade the rate-payers of a town, or a parliamen-

tary select-committee, that the water was satisfactory, was equally a way of acknowledging that existing conditions were acceptable; likewise, the argument that a water was bad was usually part of a plea to transfer ownership of the waterworks (usually from private to public control), or to undertake major capital expenditure, or to exact legal penalties from those responsible for its condition.^[9]

I suggest then that development of the kinds of water standards we now have (or of any standard of environmental quality) was not the result of scientific discovery, but that scientific arguments were wielded on all sides in an effort to obtain whatever set of standards various parties regarded as desirable. This remained the case after the coming of bacteriology. Even when techniques were available for detecting the microbes responsible for typhoid and cholera, the answer to the ultimate question of 'is the water safe to drink' depended on how much trust one was willing to assign to analytical techniques, and this in turn continued to be considered in terms of a host of other questions: were present supplies good enough, not just in terms of quality and with regard to health, but in terms of quantity and with regard to industry? How were multiple uses and claims on water to be reconciled? Compromises in distributing benefits and risks were impossible to avoid, and bacteriologists engaged in debates about the certainty and significance of their results that parallel those of chemists, and even those of the mineral water analysts a century earlier.

The story outlined thus far—a profession on the make, social and political questions in scientific disguise—may seem a familiar one to a generation of historians and sociologists of science who have emphasized the frailty of scientific knowledge as enthusiastically as their predecessors emphasized its robustness.^[10] Yet with these questions we jump back to the present, for they make clear that the problem of making rational policy in an environment of scientific uncertainty is much the same now as then. Our need for an authority in which to ground our decisions is as acute as the Victorians' was, and we too look to science, as representative of natural truths, as the source of that authority. To attend only to the undeniable realities of aggressive discipline-promotion or the struggles for water rights or even to the cultural construction of concepts of purity will not be enough, for if we are not careful such inquiries will trivialize the efforts of the past and provide no useful guidance for the present.^[11] What we need to do, using history both as sounding board and guide, is to explore general issues of the relations between science

and policy in a way that is anthropological and philosophical, as well as historical.

Two decades ago Alvin Weinberg coined the label 'transscientific,' for problems that could be stated in the terms of science, but were not scientifically soluble, an apt characterization for the problems that faced nineteenth century water analysts.^[12] Weinberg, himself a successful scientist and administrator of science, looked to various political and legal mechanisms to resolve these kinds of problems. These would utilize science, but in what way science would supplement, complement or displace other forms of making decisions Weinberg did not say.

To this problem of what science does, did, can do, or must do, very many answers have been offered. Three seem especially helpful here, though none resolves the problem that arises in Weinberg's article. The first comes from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, whose analyses of the social construction of pollution and risks have influenced the current generation of historians and sociologists of science. All societies manufactured for themselves boundaries, represented in terms of God, money, time, and nature, which defined for them the circumstances in which social action was necessary or environmental circumstances intolerable. While the boundaries themselves were ultimately arbitrary (at least to outsiders), their maintenance was vital to social solidarity. The tenacity with which peoples throughout the world clung to irrational pollution taboos could thus be understood as a real and admirable effort to maintain one's cosmology, and hence one's identity. Applied to our own society, Douglas' perspective was taken to indicate that the limits, possibilities, and necessities that had been sold to the public as uniquely privileged results of scientific rationality could be shown to be as time- and culture-specific as those of any other society.^[13] But because this recognition was to help fuel a liberation from arbitrary authority, these critics tended to be much less sympathetic than Douglas to the need to maintain the boundaries that provided identity.^[14]

Where Douglas' perspective offered little help was with the questions of how authorities came to be, and of what to do without one. So strongly did she insist on the necessity of pollution taboos, for example, that the prospect of a society rent by conflict over what its environmental standards ought to be represented a chaos too appalling to be contemplated. Yet this was the case in nineteenth century Britain; it was a time of change in which both permissible uses of public resources and mechanisms for governing that use

changed significantly. Working on what has been called the 'revolution in government' question, British historians have gone far in working out the details of this transformation. The switch from government by deference and custom to government by a professional and scientific civil service has been seen as a mixture of the drawing into government of followers of Jeremy Bentham's notions of rationalized public administration and of the response (sometimes by opportunistic officials) to the development (and discovery) of un-precedented social and technical problems. Much of the historical writing on public health belongs to this context, where, it is argued, the discovery of conditions of public danger mandated concerted action.^[15]

For these historians the bringing of science, or more broadly, expertise, into government was the interesting problem. Yet frequently their trust in the ideal of science as a neutral means of resolving conflicts and determining policy led them to take an uncritical attitude toward the actual activities of scientists; so long as it was scientists who were in the positions of policy-making, the policy they made could be assumed, in some vague sense, to bear some manner of higher epistemic warrant.^[16] The implications of this history are clearly antithetical to those of Douglas' anthropology: in this view, the authority that government came to possess by the end of the century was far from arbitrary, it was no less than the manifestation of social progress.

Yet nineteenth century scientists were quite adept at exploiting the ideal of science toward their own ends, and this leads to the third perspective, one less well-developed, but which seems especially appropriate for understanding the involvement of nineteenth century British scientists in water matters. In his study of the first half-century of the Royal Institution, Morris Berman showed how the ideal of scientific objectivity became in the early nineteenth century a hallmark of responsible decision-making and the participation of scientists accordingly indispensable.^[17] Toward this achievement Berman was cynical: the ideal that there was one truth, and that science would therefore uncover the answer to any question, was the means with which industrial society could 'smooth over structural contradictions.' Conflicts over power and struggles for justice could in this way be neutralized by being redefined as technical questions. In water matters scientists were not univocal, and the ideal of science cannot be seen mainly as a means of oppression by a dominating class. Yet the recognition of the enormous symbolic importance of

having an ideal of neutrality to legitimate policy is of central importance. This ideal was as powerful in maintaining social order (and far more flexible) than the codes of impermissible behaviours about which Douglas wrote. And while it may have come in with the rise of utilitarianism, its application to water matters, and to many other issues of technical policy, took place in a very different social setting than that which interested the revolution in government historians.

Water policy belonged to the context of Parliament, particularly the select-committee system, and to the courts, rather than to the context of the civil service. These were the structures of decision-making worked out for road and canal projects in the eighteenth century, adapted to railways and municipal improvements in the nineteenth. In all these enterprises Parliament set terms for the purchase of rights of property by entrepreneurs and others who claimed to be acting for the public good. It was a transitional means of decision-making, an organized way of eliminating traditional common law rights over use of the environment that were seen to be interfering with the public good. Traditionally, the keeper of an ancient mill had the right to flood the riverbanks upstream and to abstract a certain portion of water for the mill race, even if the river was thereby made unsuitable for other purposes, from floating boats to draining a town. But under pressure from a public health authority wishing to drain lands or to acquire gathering grounds for water supplies, Parliament might eliminate those rights, compensating those who were made to yield them.

While this context has been characterized by historians of canal and railway projects, its significance as one of the principal means of bringing science into British government has not been recognized. Above all it was a context of conflict. Both proponents of a project and those parties resisting it (there were often many, and their resistance was often primarily an attempt to gain higher compensation) were represented by counsel before parliamentary select-committees, and the witnesses the committees heard, including the scientists, engineers, and medical men, were those chosen by each party to present its case. Science was a rich and expressive idiom of that conflict, one characterized by the ideal that there was a best answer, a natural truth, for any question, and yet possessing vast flexibility, being capable indeed of giving expression to very nearly any argument one wished to advance.^[18]

It is to such a context that water analysis belongs. With a few exceptions analyses were done not by the disinterested public experts

charged with managing the people's health, but by those engaged in policy conflicts in which representatives of both sides typically claimed to be representing true science and defending the public health. Hence far from representing an elite, unified in their pursuit of science and insulated from the worlds of politics and speculation, chemists felt the tensions over water quality at least as acutely as they were felt in the world at large. While they might agree that water assessment was a matter for chemistry, they disagreed intensely on what constituted an adequate analysis, on which processes were reliable, on what skills an analyst had to possess, on how results were to be interpreted, and what public responses they indicated.

However flexible, the idiom that science provided was by no means arbitrary. Its rules and boundaries were provided respectively by rules of inference and by contemporary medical and chemical theories. Yet these concepts and ways of arguing—what are usually seen as the stuff of science itself—did not lead to resolutions, for science was in fact only to provide the arguments in such a context. But chemists—at least the best of them—were doing more than dressing up what were usually the blatantly self-interested proposals of speculators in an arcane and impressive language. Their testimony and analyses were effective precisely because they were able to show that contemporary understanding of nature made possible, plausible, or necessary certain consequences which those who hired them wished to demonstrate, say that water running in a river would invariably become pure, for example.

We can gain a sense of the possibilities of this idiom by considering the problem of water analysis itself—as it was understood in the nineteenth century, and, indeed, as it is understood today. The central question of water analysis seems a simple one: is there anything bad in the water? There are really two questions here, one of determining composition and one of assessing harmfulness, with the second the more important. It may seem that the first question, of composition, must be answered first, yet some of the most prominent analysts, like Edward Frankland (chapters 6 and 7), frequently worked in the opposite order, assessing water on other factors. Analysis might confirm their diagnoses, but its main function was to symbolize to the public the validity of the assessment.

The most important conflicts that arose in answering these questions took place over the assumptions one had to make. Take the case of simply finding out what is in the water, for example. Here three issues arise.

(1) How does one know that one has distinguished all the entities that exist in the water that ought to be detectable using the analytical scheme one is using? For example, mineral water chemists were concerned with the various inorganic salts a water contained. But they could never be confident that what they isolated as a particular chemical species, say sodium chloride, was not in fact a mixture of various species which had not yet been distinguished. Hence a chemist's claim to have made a complete analysis of a water was equally a statement that all chemical species had been discovered and could be distinguished. Bacteriology presented a similar issue. During the '80s and early '90s most bacteriological water analysts were willing to admit that their medium of choice, gelatine–peptone, was not suited to the growth of all microbe species. In practice, however, they tended to treat the colonies that grew as corresponding to the actual microbe population of the water.

(2) How does one know that analytical operations do not change the material being analysed in some way, and if one assumes such changes do happen, how does one determine what changes they are? In 1815 the Scottish chemist John Murray proposed that rearrangement of acids and bases went on in mineral water samples during analysis; what a patient drank might be a quite different mixture of salts from what the chemist discovered on analysis. But Murray saw no way to confirm his idea; as he pointed out, any intervention to establish the composition at a particular stage was equally open to the charge that it altered the sample. Similar criticisms were raised with regard both to processes for determining the organic matter in potable waters and to bacteriological techniques.

(3) How does one know that one has chosen the appropriate analytical scheme, that one is analysing water on the right level? During the century analysts were interested in telling four or five distinct stories of what actually was in the water: at first it was inorganic salts; then various parameters relating to organic matter, living and dead; then numbers of bacteria, and finally species of bacteria. When the question of what was in the water was raised, questioner and analyst were usually thinking in terms of one of these schemes. But it was not always clear which one was appropriate to the questions at hand.

As for assessment, key questions had to do with whether one knew what the active medicinal or pathogenic entities in waters were, and, if they were known, whether they could be reliably detected. For

the most part, the mineral water chemists active in the early part of the century claimed they did know the identities of the active medicinal ingredients and could readily detect them. The potable water analysts who succeeded them usually admitted that they were not sure what caused water-borne diseases and had grave doubts that the entities could be reliably detected. For most of the century confusion about how to understand disease causation (and hence how to demonstrate that one had discovered the cause or even a cause of a particular disease) made it unclear how to interpret the information provided by analysis. Had such questions been raised solely with regard to epidemic diseases, epidemiology might have provided means of resolving these sorts of disagreements, but both mineral water physicians and sanitarians were at least as interested in chronic conditions, where it was practically impossible to single out the effects of a single cause from a host of others.

Most potable water analysts did not even claim to be directly measuring the harmful entities water might contain, but based their assessments on various sorts of 'indicator' arguments. In modern chemistry an indicator is some substance that in some 'visible way shows the condition of . . . some system.'^[19] Something they measured, the water analysts claimed, bore a definite relation to the whatever-it-was that caused water-borne disease. Even after discovery of the cholera and typhoid microbes, indicator arguments remained important, since the tests for detecting these very infrequent contaminants were tricky and subject to too many false negatives (cases in which a negative result is obtained when the pathogen is actually present in the water from which the sample has been taken).

Several types of indicator arguments were used. Some chemists conceived the organic matter they measured as containing (or even being) the harmful substance though the extent of its harmfulness might vary from time to time, being often below the threshold. Others viewed the entities they measured as an innocuous matrix for the harmful entities, even though the harmful entities might only rarely be present and hence the tests would give many false positives (cases in which the indicator would be present, yet the dangerous entity absent). A few others, particularly microscopists, held out hope of discovering some entity that had nearly a one-to-one correlation with the dangerous matter.

A consequence of the use of indicators was a great deal of controversy as to how much significance should be assigned to a particular finding. Were signs of sewage contamination alone sufficient to con-

demn a water? How weak might indicators be and yet still warrant being taken seriously? If one based one's advice on the finding of indicators known to give frequent false positives, how was one to keep the public from becoming complacent? And if one ignored such indicators, what was the point of analysis? And if a water-borne epidemic struck in such a case, was not the analyst responsible? How chemists responded to such dilemmas depended on their own values, the strategies they took in dealing with the public, the contexts in which they were working, and the vested interests they were working for.

It can be seen from this outline that water analysts regularly faced central problems (and paradoxes) of the philosophy of science, problems of causation or correlation, of realism or operationalism, of distinguishing fact from theory, of whether observation involves intervention. They were also regularly confronting central problems of political philosophy (what was to be the role of the scientist in government?) and ethics (what responsibility did the water analyst hold to the water drinking public?). However much the resolutions they found to these problems reflected the immediate circumstances of the case at hand and the interests of the client who was sponsoring the science, the questions were real questions that arise and will continue to arise whenever societies grapple with great issues of public policy.

This book takes the following course. The first two chapters are on mineral water analysis, mainly in Britain and mainly between 1780 and 1850. The first concentrates on methodological and epistemic matters, the second on social and ideological contexts. Chapter 3 takes up the beginnings of concern for the quality of potable water, focusing on controversies over the quality of London's water in the years around 1828. Chapter 4 considers the conflict between chemical and microscopical methods of analysis that occurred in connection with the London water controversy of 1849–52. Chapter 5 deals with the impact of Justus von Liebig's conception of the zymotic process of disease on the theory and practice of water analysis during the late '50s and early '60s. It suggests how markedly different from previous conceptions of impurity were the zymotic poisons Liebig envisioned. Chapters 6 and 7 are concerned with the central role of Edward Frankland. The former chronicles his career as a water scientist and explains how he came in the late 1860s to the radical positions he took, while the latter is concerned with the reac-

tions of other water scientists to Frankland, particularly in the '70s and early '80s. Chapter 8 deals with the emergence of a new context for water analysis and a new group of water analysts, the public analysts and local medical officers, who began in the 1870s to bring water assessment into their work in an important way. Chapter 9 deals with the transformation of the germ theory into the science of bacteriology and is concerned with debates during the mid 1880s on what meaning if any could rightly be assigned to the number of bacterial colonies that appeared on a plate in which a small sample of water had been cultured. Chapter 10 takes up the incorporation of ecological and determinative bacteriology into water quality evaluation. It shows how limited was the utility of bacteriological techniques to those most concerned with water quality. The conclusion returns to the issue of expertise and raises the question of what constituted progress in water analysis and the larger question of what constitutes satisfactory authority in technological controversies.