4—
The 'Hard Water and Animalculae Sellers':
Analysis and Politics in London, 1849–52

Your Stomach would turn because your mind turned first.^[1]
Sir Edmund Beckett

In 1849 the question of how London was to be supplied with water again became a burning issue. The next three years saw investigations of new (and old) alternative supplies, a new series of indignant editorials, new attempts to squeeze from science definitive justification of opposing programmes. With the 1849–52 controversy we have clearly crossed a crucial watershed—we are now in familiar historical territory, in the great age of sanitary reform. Cholera had come and gone once and was just ending its second visit. Edwin Chadwick had defined sanitary progress, and during the controversy John Snow would advance his famous hypothesis of the specific link between cholera and the consumption of water befouled by the excreta of a cholera victim.

It may seem that these factors—the definition of public sanitary responsibility, an incipient scientific understanding of the terrible effects of bad water, and the shock of epidemic—would give the 1849–52 controversy a sharply different character from its predecessor. Yet the continuities outweigh the discontinuities. Again consumer issues were prominent: people objected to heavy charges for an intermittent supply of bad water. The conflicts were not the class conflicts of cholera epidemics, but conflicts over political and financial control of the water supply, and the scientific debates on water quality had less to do with working out epidemiological relations between water and cholera than with seeking a politically serviceable

concept of impurity and determining which branch of professionals would henceforth rule over water quality.

Three distinct concepts of impurity surfaced during the controversy, each with its own methods for testing water and implications for policy. Two of these were new: the concepts of purity as softness and as freedom from microscopic life. Both new approaches were worked out by reformers trying to replace both the water companies and the polluted waters which they supplied. The companies' defenders, on the other hand, continued to rely mainly on mineral water chemistry to demonstrate that the existing supply was safe.

The John Wright of the 1849–52 controversy was Edwin Chadwick. Following the lead of his patron Bentham, Chadwick preached the creed of rationalized, efficient, and coordinated public services. With respect to water this meant complete urban drainage and plenty of water to flush all wastes from cities to sewage farms. This perspective emerged in his great and controversial report On the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain in 1842, and was embodied in the 1848 Public Health Act, with Chadwick himself a member of the General Board of Health that would administer the Act.^[2] The Act did not apply to London however, and Chadwick's involvement with London's water was part of his campaign to bring to the metropolis the sanitary benefits the provinces were to receive. He saw need for three reforms: replacement of the polluted Thames water with pure water, elimination of the water companies, and transfer of the administration of the water works to a board of responsible professional administrators. To that end he prepared (and the GBH published in 1850) a two volume report on the Metropolis Water Supply.^[3] The controversy, however, was well along when report appeared; it was neither the source nor the resolution.

Chadwick had, in fact, little influence on the structure of the public works industry. Water supplies were already in existence in many places; they had been developed piecemeal as groups of investors or far-sighted municipalities had succeeded in getting through Parliament the private bills that would give them a monopoly to supply a certain area. Public agitation, the gearing up of rate payers or investors for the expense and uncertainty of the Parliamentary ordeal, was an essential part of this process. In potential railway investors promoters planted the prospect of profit; in water consumers they contrasted the deplorable present with the delectable future.^[4] Judging from the reports of breakdowns in the waterworks, of visible

swimming things in the water, and of imperious responses from the companies to complaints about service or charges, London's water consumers had good reason to be dissatisfied. Yet their dissatisfaction was not spontaneous. As in 1828 public outrage became organized political activity through the efforts of engineers, speculators, and sanitarians who had various interests in seeing changes in the existing arrangements. Such groups commissioned the scientific studies that proved the existing supply to be impure, loosed the pamphleteers, organized the meetings that produced the petitions. A great deal more was at issue than the quality of the water and the welfare of those who drank it; at stake were the values of the land from which the new supply would come, the values of the companies' shares, the careers of engineers who planned or built new supplies, and the future powers of existing governing bodies, such as the London vestries. One count listed 25 alternative schemes which had been proposed for supplying London with water and the water quality issue was as much a means of struggle among these rivals as an end in itself.^[5]

Already in December 1848 a Bishopsgate public meeting had attacked the water monopoly^[6] and at a spate of meetings during the fall of 1849 and the winter of 1850 the companies were attacked for their unresponsiveness during the recent cholera epidemic. On October 11, 1849, a Times leader announced that it was time for the water monopoly to end. It was occasioned by the New River Company's 'business-as-usual' attitude when requested to supply extra water to areas heavily struck by cholera.^[7] The editorial reflected Chadwick's views: that it was high time to dissolve the companies and that they had no right to compensation based on future revenues since under common law water belonged to the public.^[8] Beginning on Christmas Day and continuing for the better part of a week, the Times made good its threat by publishing 'The Water Monopoly and the Sanitary Movement,' a record of the companies' highhandedness over more than 30 years.^[9]

Meanwhile agitation was brewing in other quarters. At an October 23rd meeting sponsored by the Metropolitan Water Supply Association (associated with James Taberner's scheme for a well water supply), several parish medical officers voiced their concern about the poor quality of the supply.^[10] From mid December to March a series of meetings took place in the parishes, sponsored either by Taberner's organization or by the London (Watford) Spring Water Company, promoter of Telford's Brushy Meadows supply. In part

Figure 4.1
A H Hassall's drawings of living things in the London waters excited alarm during
the 1849–52 controversy. Hassall admitted that the drawings were composites;
the microscopic field wasn't quite this crowded ( Lancet , i, 1851, pp 192–3).

the enthusiastic response came from the fact that these proposals

Figure 4.1
(continued)

posed no threat to London's system of parochial government. Unlike Chadwick, who preferred expertise to inefficient vestry democracy, Taberner and Samuel Homersham of the Watford Company were willing to work within the vestry system.^[11]

Chadwick's report appeared in late May 1850, overshadowed, however, by a work that had appeared two months earlier, Arthur Hill Hassall's Microscopical Examination of the Water supplied to the Inhabitants of London and Suburban Districts , one of the most effective appeals to sensibility in the history of public health.^[12] Hassall, a struggling young medical man with a penchant for natural history, had microscopically examined water of each of the companies that served London. In his book, and a year later as the Lancet 's 'Analytical Sanitary Commission,' he published drawings (coloured in the book) of the crowds of disgusting organisms he found in each water. The drawings appeared in circular frames, giving the impression that they represented exactly what anyone could see in his water under magnification. (Hassall eventually admitted that his drawings were in fact composites and that the waters were not quite so crowded as his drawings implied.^[13] ) The most important thing Hassall's book did was to make microscopic life a new category of impurity, and a great deal of debate in 1851 and 1852 was concerned with what exactly such creatures signified.^[14]

By the end of 1850 there were still eight more or less distinct plans competing to replace the companies' supply, with Chadwick's scheme (utilizing springs and wells in Surrey) being the leading candidate.^[15] But the water bill introduced by the government in May 1851 disappointed almost everyone. Ignoring the advice of its General Board of Health, the government had commissioned three of London's most prominent chemists, A W Hofmann of the Royal College of Chemistry, Thomas Graham of University College, and William Allen Miller of King's College, to report on the water question. Their report appeared in June and had the effect of deflating enthusiasm, not so much owing to its criticisms of the alternatives, but simply by raising so many unanswered and unanswerable questions as to make any big change seem an irresponsible gamble. Although Hofmann, Graham, and Miller thought it likely that the Thames and Lea would become even more foul as upstream towns built sewers, they found no evidence that the water was dangerous at present.^[16] On the basis of their report, the government chose to make no change in the sources of supply. Its bill called for merger of the companies into a single company with dividends restricted to five per cent. Hardly anyone liked the bill and it disappeared in committee.^[17] In 1852 the government presented another bill, one focusing on quality. The Thames companies were required to move their intakes upstream, to filter their water, to cover reservoirs, and

to supply water on constant service. In exchange for these concessions they retained control of a profitable monopoly. Passage of this bill effectively relieved the companies of pressure to change the source of supply until 1866.^[18]

Cholera and the Concept of Impurity—
What Does Bad Water Do?

With this sketch we can turn to the arguments about quality and analysis that surfaced during the controversy. In the clamorous public meetings of 1849–50 there were numerous allusions to impurities in the water—to its 'organic matter,' to the fact that the Lambeth Company served 'larger and fatter animalculae,' to 'sulphate and carbonate of lime, and large quantities of saline matter, more or less injurious to the human system,' or simply to the 'impure matter,' 40,000 tons of which went into the river daily, to be 'stirred up by tides and steamers, and then . . . served up . . . for breakfast the next morning.'^[19]

The water was thus found guilty of anything it could be guilty of. But such accusations were products of heated meetings, expressions in the idiom of the public health movement of the anger many people felt toward the companies. Consumers knew that what came from the tap was foul and that the sources of supply were foul. They might not know exactly which of the multiple sorts of impurity was most reprehensible but that made little difference. Any concept would do.

In the months after cholera had killed over 14,000 people in greater London, it is hardly surprising to find that disease too getting listed among the sins of the water supply. The physician and microscopist Edwin Lankester asserted that the areas worst hit by cholera were those with the worst water. He could not find anything that seemed directly responsible in the water, but its impurity was such that it was 'no surprise that disease was produced.'^[20] Yet even Lankester did not suggest that the water was transmitting cholera, but only that it had likely 'greatly aggravated cholera mortality,' i.e. by acting as a predisposing cause or producer of debility. The chairman of the Bermondsey Board of Guardians went further, insisting that the cholera 'had peculiarly chosen for its ravages those districts south of the Thames supplied with its waters, and, as if to indicate its deleterious influence, had literally stayed at the point

where that supply ceased.'^[21] The chairman at a February 1850 meeting in Southwark spoke of the 'duty to remove, if not one of the causes, certainly one of the most powerful agents in the extension' of cholera.^[22] In the spring of 1851 the Times itself spoke of 'impure water' containing 'the seeds of death' as certain fact. The GBH report likewise attributed cholera to water polluted with animal and vegetable contamination.^[23]

It would be easy to see in these statements the beginnings of a modern concept of water as the vector of diseases like cholera even while recognizing that ideas about the nature of the morbid agents in the water remained various and vague. It is true that the 1849 cholera epidemic was the occasion both for the first edition of John Snow's famous work 'On the mode of the Communication of Cholera,' which correctly recognized water supply as the major vector, and for William Budd's announcement of a water-borne cholera germ, the cholera fungus, discovered by his associate, the Bristol microscopist Frederick Brittan. Yet the first edition of Snow's work was indistinguishable from the stack of contemporary speculations on cholera; Snow's convincing epidemiological analyses of the Broad Street outbreak and of cholera distribution in areas supplied by the different south London water companies were done during the 1854 epidemic and only appeared in the second edition. Likewise, Budd's claims that a fungus unique to cholera victims had been discovered and that it was the cause of cholera were rejected in short order, the first on grounds of faulty observation, the second on grounds of unsound inference.^[24]

It is also striking that the water reformers made less use of the epidemic than they might have done. When their statements are closely examined, it is clear that Lankester and the others were not attributing cholera directly to the water. Instead their comments reflect a medical theory dominant in the early public health movement, sometimes misleadingly called 'miasmatism' but bearing a closer resemblance to the constitutional theories considered in the last chapter.^[25] Health and disease were seen as consequences of the total environment. The conditions of city life—the stale and vitiated air, the uncleanliness, crowdedness, alcoholism, poor food, and foul water—acted collectively to undermine health: the combined effect of all these 'predisposing causes' was virtually the disease itself.^[26]

Such was the context of water quality discussion in 1849–50. Lankester's assertion that bad water 'greatly aggravated' cholera mortality treated bad water as a predisposing cause which weak-

ened those who caught cholera.^[27] Others were concerned about the predisposing effects of dead sparrows or extract of churchyard in their water.^[28] Chadwick's associate F O Ward wrote that 'the dilute impurities of even the clearest-looking Thames water, when introduced day after day into the blood, must produce a certain effect . . . of a more or less injurious kind.'^[29] The body was like a sponge, according to another: membranes in the lungs and stomach absorbing everything and passing all on to the blood. Even Hassall's animalcules were probably predisposers. These were 'liable to disturb the bowels, especially during such an epidemic as cholera; and in this way . . . would act as a predisposing cause of the disease.'^[30] These ideas were fully exploited in Chadwick's water report. Here cholera was seen as an unusually virulent form of the diarrhoea normally caused by bad water. The source of virulence was a decaying matter in the atmosphere, which, being soluble, could be transferred to (and thus by) water.^[31]

This manner of viewing illnesses as products of the totality of predisposing causes had great utility for sanitary reformers. It provided the rationale for their concern with all physical, social, and moral components of the environment and suggested that any reform, no matter how small, produced real improvement. Yet when it came to the reform of a single factor, such as water supply, the same perspective was a handicap. Seeing each case of illness as an outcome of a long history of debilitating circumstances did not sanction the targeting of a single cause. One of the arguments against the Budd–Brittan cholera fungus theory (and against Snow, even after 1854) was that it was simplistic and illusory to think of 'the cause of cholera,' since like any other event it had many causes.^[32] No matter how much critics might despise the existing water supply they did not have a set of concepts that would allow them to single it out as bearing the responsibility for cholera. Like Wright, they lacked a theory that would lend immediacy to their concerns.

Soft Water Becomes an Issue

Thus the 1849 cholera, which to us would provide the best reason for getting better water, had relatively little importance in the reformers' arguments. We can now look at the arguments they did use. Chadwick's main complaint was that London's water was too hard. This was not an important medical issue, though some eighteenth

century physicians had seen hard water as responsible for various illnesses, particularly bladder stones. Hardness had also been of little interest to most of the authors on mineral waters prior to William Saunders' Treatise on Mineral Waters (1800), where its importance to the growing textile industry was emphasized.^[33]

To a significant degree Chadwick himself was responsible for making the hardness issue so central. The foundations of his concern are evident in the famous Sanitary Report of 1842. Already he had decided that the prime cause of disease was atmospheric impurity and that water could help by 'cleansing and removing solid refuse and impurities.'^[34] But too often there wasn't enough water to flush the cities and scour the new narrow bore pipe sewers. As for water quality, Chadwick virtually ignored it in the report, noting only that some of the provincial informants had suggested a relationship between bad water and illness.^[35] And even then he noted that while the public usually found water with visible animal pollution most objectionable, that containing mineral salts was actually more dangerous. The main brief against hard water was not directly medical at all: it was unsuitable for removing urban filth because it wasted an enormous quantity of soap. The report's final word on water was that 'the formation of all habits of cleanliness is obstructed by defective supplies of water.'^[36]

In the 1850 report on London's water Chadwick discussed three types of impurity: the organic contaminations from sewage which presumably contributed to cholera; the microscopic (and occasionally macroscopic) organisms that lived in the water; and the hardness. Hardness was the most significant.^[37] He argued that hard water was unhealthy (it hindered solution and hence digestion but did not, he thought, cause bladder stones). He cited the view of the famous chef Alexis Soyer that soft water was better for cooking, and claimed that soft water made more (and better) tea from the same quantity of leaves.^[38] He devoted ten pages to the enormous amount of soap wasted each year in the metropolis—£630,000 worth, according to one estimate, all due to hard water.^[39]

Most other water-supply reformers shared Chadwick's emphasis on hardness and for most of a decade the issue dominated discussion of water quality. Thomas Clark of Aberdeen called hardness the most important qualitative issue. Lyon Playfair lectured at the Museum of Practical Geology that hard water caused disease and all manner of industrial problems. He insisted, as did the Chadwickian publicist F O Ward, that animals (and humans) instinctively chose

soft water over hard.^[40]

Especially in the wake of a catastrophic cholera epidemic which Chadwick himself attributed in part to the water supply, matters of tea-steeping and soap-wasting might not seem to provide the most compelling reasons for a change in water supply. In some ways, however, the hardness argument was stronger than one founded on a putative link between cholera and water. Its advantages were twofold: first, it was impractical to do anything about it. While water softening processes existed they were not economical on a large scale. As Chadwick and his followers repeatedly pointed out, no matter how effectively the Thames might be freed from sewage, its water would still be hard.^[41] Second, in contrast to such concepts of impurity as dissolved decomposing matter, hardness was unambiguous. Chemists might disagree about its significance, but there was little room for disagreement as to the level itself—the procedures for measuring hardness (either Clark's test based on the precipitate formed with soap, or the older method of driving off CO₂ which would precipitate most of the carbonates) were simple and well-accepted. The 1828 campaign had foundered on chemists' inability to agree on what sort of impurity they should be concerned with. Focusing on hardness avoided this problem, though of course it did nothing to resolve that vexed issue of just what it was in polluted water that Londoners ought to be worrying about.

The Vexed Problem of Life

Chadwick's other objection to the quality of London's water (in addition to its hardness and dissolved atmospheric impurity) was that water swarming with microscopic life could not be good to drink. The propriety of relying on waters populated with invisible creatures had been a minor issue in 1828, and not so much a medical question of whether such creatures might harm health as a question of sensibility. Witnesses had reported 'shrimp-like creatures,' fish, periwinkles, and 'little round black things' in their water; microscopic life had been regarded as disgusting and improper in a public water supply.^[42]

The reformers of 1849–52 made a great deal more use of microscopical evidence. They hoped to show that one's instinctive revulsion at such water rested on an instinctive understanding that such creatures were either harmful themselves or infallible indicators of an otherwise undetectable danger.

Chadwick's chief sources on this issue were the Manchester chemist and sanitarian Robert Angus Smith, who had been active in sanitary science for several years, and Hassall, a newcomer to sanitary matters. Smith had investigated London's water for the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission and his report 'On the Air and Water of Towns' had been published by the British Association.^[43] He had surveyed the length of the Thames, collecting data on chemical composition (including hardness, of course) as well as observing the changing flora and fauna in the river. It seemed to Smith that changes in the species of microscopic life might prove a sensitive indicator of changes that were indistinguishable by chemical means. He counselled water analysts to allow their samples to deposit their sediment, for the organisms in this deposit would be the best characteristic of the quality of the water.^[44]

Yet though he would continue to advocate this procedure for the next two decades, Smith was never able to determine precisely which species corresponded to which conditions of pollution. In practice his indices of impurity were based not so much on species, but on the number of individuals, their motility, size, and whether they were animal or vegetable. Even aesthetic factors had some standing: Smith noted that samples from heavily polluted reaches of the inner London Thames 'contained animalcules larger, fatter, and uglier than any preceding.'^[45]

Arthur Hill Hassall's handling of the issue was more detailed and sophisticated than Smith's, but he too came up against the same problem of assigning significances to the organisms living in various waters. Hassall had been born into a medical family in the Thamesside town of Teddington. While studying medicine in Dublin in the early '40s he had turned to natural history and become an authority on the microscopic marine life of the Wicklow coast. Having returned to London in the late '40s, Hassall became involved in the sanitary problems of the north London parish in which he was living. His microscopic studies of the water his patients drank grew into an investigation of the water supplied to other parts of the metropolis. Following the lead of Frederick Accum, he also began to look into food adulteration, and these activities brought him to the attention of Thomas Wakley, the reforming editor of the Lancet , who published his exposés, and of Chadwick and the GBH, which employed him as an analytical microscopist for most of the remainder of the decade.^[46] Hassall examined water from the Thames itself, taken from the reaches where the companies got their supplies, waters from the

outlets of sewers flowing into the Thames, and finally samples of the water the companies distributed, taken either from their reservoirs or from standpipes. Like Smith, he justified microscopy on the grounds that there were no chemical means to distinguish harmful from safe organic matter.^[47]

Hassall found that all the waters contained microscopic life but his hope was to discover characteristic floras and faunas (and other distinct microscopical characteristics) of waters taken from different aquatic environments or treated in different ways. In a few cases he had some success. Water from the inner London Thames had lots of paramecia. Sewer water had worms, black carbonaceous matter, and wheat husks and other materials able to pass unscathed through the digestive tract. Examination of the companies' waters produced no surprises. Several contained traces of sewage yet Hassall was not able to recognise a distinct flora and fauna for each company as he had hoped to. On the contrary, there was great variation in the living things found in different pipes served by the same company.^[48]

On the assumption that what worked for Chadwick and the General Board of Health would work for them, Homersham's London (Watford) Spring Water Company commissioned Edwin Lankester, a well-known sanitarian and naturalist, and Peter Redfern, lecturer in Physiology at King's College, to do a third microscopical examination of London's water in 1852. They too claimed that microscopy was superior to chemistry, and proclaimed theirs as the most complete microscopical survey to date. Their reports did have a sobriety lacking in Smith's and Hassall's; they made their point through charts of the numbers of species in different waters (the Watford spring had the fewest) and of the presence or absence of particular species in the different waters.^[49]

As pioneering aquatic ecology or as a progressive step in the move from a chemical to a biological definition of the agents of disease, the work of these microscopists may seem important. As an approach to water analysis it was a failure, and the great problem for microscopists between 1850 and 1852 was how to respond to well-founded 'so what?' For their results to be useful in making water policy they had to make two assumptions. The first was that a constant relationship existed between an aquatic environment and the organisms that populated it. By the time Hassall testified before the Board of Health (probably in March or April 1850) he was able to suggest some characteristic organisms of ponds, streams, and lakes. Yet even supposing such a relationship existed and the details of

it could be worked out, it still offered no new information: since everyone knew the Thames received sewage, to find in its water organisms characteristic of sewage would neither enlighten nor surprise policy-makers.

The second assumption was of a third, hidden element in the correlation: that the distinctions one made with the microscope somehow corresponded to the presence or absence of whatever it was that made water more or less unhealthy. One had either to suppose that some form of life was directly responsible for the harmfulness or that through microscopy one could make finer distinctions among waters than one could with chemistry, and that one of these fine classes would turn out to correspond to harmful water, even though the organisms in that class might not themselves be harmful. Smith, Hassall, and later microscopists who imitated them made both assumptions but they had great trouble justifying either.

The microscopists and their allies offered three resolutions to this problem of significance. These can be designated as the weak, the moderate, and the strong interpretation, according to the magnitude and immediacy of the danger each indicated in a biologically impure water supply. The interpretations were not mutually exclusive and many writers, including Chadwick, used all of them. In fact they formed a concentric series of rhetorical defenses. If the strong interpretation fell, one could still fall back on the moderate position or even the virtually invulnerable weak position.

The strong interpretation was that certain organisms were themselves the exciting causes of diseases, including epidemic diseases like cholera. The idea was not so much a portent of the germ theory of disease (whose origins would lie in pathology and fermentation theory rather than microscopy) as it was a return to a much older animalcular theory of disease. Neither Hassall nor any of the other reformers (with the exception of William Budd) was prepared to assign a particular bug to a particular disease; they were pointing out only that there were numerous diseases known to be caused by parasitic worms and fungi, and hence that it was plausible to think that various of the organisms in the London water supply might be capable of 'attacking the human frame from within,' as Hassall put it. Hassall himself believed that there was a germ of cholera, probably water-borne.^[50]

There was, in fact, a likely candidate. William Budd had claimed to have identified a cholera fungus the previous fall. On 26 September 1849 he had written to the Times to call attention to the impor-

tant discovery by the Bristol microscopists Frederick Brittan and J G Swayne of what Budd insisted was the cause of cholera, a fungus found in the excreta of cholera victims. Criticism came quickly. A B Granville, of mineral water fame, pointed out that Budd had offered no proof that the organism was the cause of cholera; it seemed more likely to be commonly but not causally associated with the disease. George Busk reported that the investigation of the London Microscopical Society showed Brittan's organisms to be neither exclusive to cholera nor in all cases even organisms.^[51]

It may be true, as Margaret Pelling has argued, that the London medical establishment was overly quick to judge.^[52] But along with its other failings, the animalcular/fungal theory in too many ways seemed not the kind of theory people were looking for. It offered a monocausal explanation when most medical men still understood disease multicausally, it failed (or appeared to fail) to come to grips with what to writers like Granville seemed the most important questions: why the disease appeared when and where it did, why it attacked some and not others. Those writing on the need for better water sometimes mentioned the possibility that some among the population of microscopic water organisms might cause disease, but they did not attach much weight to that possibility.^[53]

The second interpretation of the significance of microscopic life, the moderate version, was that the creatures themselves were not harmful, but were reliable indicators of something that was. According to most authorities, this was decomposing matter. It was well accepted even before Pasteur that the function of at least some invisible animals and plants was to act as scavengers, purifying the world of matter that would otherwise become dangerous through its decay.^[54] The idea was ancient, yet nicely adapted to pre-Darwinian biological thought, and especially to a natural theology of water purification in which organisms were perfectly adapted to their environments; each source of food had its consumer and every predator its prey. In the early '50s this view gained renewed visibility through the work of the chemist Robert Warington on the balanced aquarium, in which scavenging snails assimilated decomposing plant and animal matter and kept the water pure.^[55] Because nature was so well balanced, discovery of the dominant species of microorganisms was assumed to indicate the presence of the particular food of this organism. Species that thrived on decaying organic matter signalled the presence of such matter. As Hassall put it, 'A knowledge of what constitutes the food of the infusoria has practical bearings upon the

purity of the water of no inconsiderable importance.'^[56]

Yet Hassall had trouble making this argument do any work. Almost everyone involved in the 1849–52 controversy, including scientists who testified in defence of the water companies in the 1851 and 1852 committee hearings, agreed that microorganisms were a sign of decaying matter (though a few noted that even the purest water contained some microscopic life). Not everyone saw the same implication, however. Where Hassall and the reformers saw organisms as proof of impurity, defenders of the companies saw them as proof of its absence, arguing that the microorganisms could be assumed to multiply to consume food as rapidly as that food appeared. Hence while the organisms might indicate the presence of impure matter, they also indicated the occurrence of purification. Had the impure matter in the water not been purified, the organisms would have been unable to survive, they pointed out: even Hassall's experiments showed that water saturated with hydrogen sulphide, which many regarded as the principal poison produced from rotting matter, killed microorganisms, just as a hydrogen sulphide atmosphere killed caged birds exposed to it.^[57] There was a response to this objection: the organisms might not always be caught up in their purification operations, but this was not taken very seriously, since any really foul conditions would be at least as harmful to microorganisms as to humans.^[58]

Vile Bodies

What with their strongest interpretation ignored for lack of evidence, their moderate interpretation collapsing under the weight of its own ambiguity, most of the reformers ended up relying on the third, 'weak,' interpretation: that the finding of microscopic life in water rendered that water unsuitable for a public supply on the grounds that, as Smith put it, microorganisms were 'disgusting.' It was also argued that if those most subject to the effects of urban squalor were to be persuaded to give up gin for water, the water had to be at least minimally appetizing.^[59] The interpretation was 'weak' in two senses: first, it admitted that discovering microscopic life did not convey any additional analytical information—one knew nothing more about whether there really was anything dangerous in the water. Second, it could be (and was) objected to on the grounds that visceral reactions were too subjective a basis for changing wa-

ter supplies. Yet however weak the argument, it was in practice the strongest of the interpretations.

Directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, all the microscopists implied that there was something disgusting about living things in one's drinking water. (Lankester and Redfern, however, were a great deal more careful than the others in presenting their investigations as contributions to natural history.) The strongest imagery was Hassall's. By including graphic descriptions of the river banks from which he had taken samples, Hassall managed to convey the idea that any living thing in the waters that lapped these banks must also be impure. In his description of microscopic life of the inner London Thames, for example, he alluded to the 'carcasses of dead animals, rotting, festering, swarming with flies and maggots,' that lined its banks.^[60] Even the water supplied by the New River Company from springs near Hertford was vitiated during its slow flow toward London; in one place it received water from an 'unclean and weedy ditch' in which algae were 'rising up into the water like clouds, and affording a nidus for the shelter, growth, and development of entomostracae, Infusoria, etc.'^[61]

It worked. In parliament Sir Benjamin Hall used Hassall's drawings to assail opponents to water reform, saying that 'he never saw such odious, ugly things as his Hon Friend's constituents [in Lambeth] were continually eating and drinking.'^[62] The disgust in Hassall's descriptions was taken up in reviews in medical and literary periodicals. Charles Kingsley noted that the supplies 'swarm with living animalcules.' Having presented his versions of the moderate and strong interpretations of these creatures, he went on to write of the 'animalcules which haunt the sewer mouths' and the 'filth-bred monsters'; of the River Lea, 'swarming with organic life'; of London's cisterns, each 'an alembic for further putrefaction, further multiplication of these wriggling monsters,' and finally of the deserved fate of Londoners for tolerating such a water supply:

you are literally filled with the fruits of your own devices, with rats and mice and such small deer, paramecia and entomostraceae, and kicking things with horrid names, which you see in microscopes at the Polytechnic, and rush home and call for brandy—without the water—with stone, and gravel [i.e. bladder stones, attributed to hard water], and dyspepsia, and fragments of your own muscular tissue tinged with your own bile [another of Hassall's microscopical discoveries].^[63]

The defenders of the water supply saw such arguments as the sacrifice of reason to emotion. Alfred Swaine Taylor, at the height

of his career and London's leading forensic chemist, admitted that water with things growing in it 'looks offensive,' and even that 'the water acquires a taste and is injured,' yet attached little significance to these factors. There was no evidence that consuming 'microscopic animals' had ever done anyone any harm, he insisted, and added, 'I believe we should eat nothing and drink nothing if we used the microscope before hand to settle the point.' Swallowing animalculae was not more harmful than eating fish.^[64] W T Brande (now an ally of the companies) and the engineer Thomas Hawksley (a former ally of Chadwick's who had left the fold) took much the same line. Brande maintained that it made no difference whether the organic matter in water was alive or dead.^[65] Hawksley observed that if Londoners were going to be so perversely 'fastidious' they would have to pay for that luxury.^[66] In their view, science, chemistry in particular, had progressed so far that scientists could now say exactly what was harmful in water. To cater to ignorance and prejudice would be to regress.^[67]

At odds then were two opposing frameworks for assessing water quality. Those who found Hassall's exposés persuasive took the view that instincts were a reliable guide to safety. This was an ancient idea, yet a central tenet of the early public health movement. Numerous tracts argued that the Creator had endowed us with instinctive revulsions to guide us to dispose of wastes correctly.^[68] Poised against this was the view of Brande and the chemists, who saw in science a way to test our instinctive judgments, to show through reason that what appeared unsafe might be safe, but also to reveal hazards we would not otherwise have recognized. As counsel for the New River Company put it in a question to Taylor in 1851, 'however offensive to the imagination it may be that privies should be emptied into the river from which water is taken to drink, practically the effect depends on the quantity of water, and the facility it has for decomposition?'^[69]

A Role for Chemistry

The utility of chemistry and the credibility of chemists were under scrutiny during the 1849–52 controversy quite as much as were microscopy and microscopists. If the chemists fared better than the microscopists it was probably owing to their having a longer history of useful service in advising governments on technical matters and to their being the professionals who had traditionally been

called on to assess the quality of water. During the 1849–52 controversy, chemistry—as a body of knowledge and techniques and as a group of practitioners—saw service mainly on the side of the water companies. They hired the most prominent of London's consulting chemists: Brande, A S Taylor, Arthur Aikin, and J T Cooper. To be sure, the reformers employed chemists—Chadwick relied on Robert Angus Smith and Lyon Playfair, and consulted A W Hofmann; the Watford Spring Company hired Thomas Clark, the Aberdeen chemistry professor, and John Stenhouse and Dugald Campbell of St Bartholomew's Hospital, while W A Miller of King's College, J E D Rodgers of St George's Hospital, and Harman Lewis of the Westminster Hospital advised a company desiring to supply parts of south London with Wandle water.^[70] Yet none of the reformers' chemists had any strong claims to make; all appeared confused about how to document the impurities in water. The neutral investigation commissioned in 1851 by the Home Office also employed chemists: Miller and Hofmann as well as Thomas Graham of University College, another prominent academic chemist.

There was no deep-seated scientific reason why chemistry should come down so heavily on the side of the companies; the concepts and methods of that science would not automatically lead one to conclude that London's water was good. Instead, the splitting of science into rival camps of microscopists and chemists had more to do with the strategy of the reformers. Of their two main approaches to the question of impurity, one, the microscopical approach, denied the authority of chemistry, while the other, hardness, scarcely required it. Chadwick did have theoretical grounds for doubting the capacity of chemistry to monitor the changes he was most interested in, but the most important factor probably was the rules of evidence adopted by the select committees of 1851 and 1852.^[71] The committees refused to grant the General Board of Health standing as an interested party, and it was unable therefore to present testimony to rebut the chemistry-based arguments of the companies' witnesses.

The companies' chemists put up a united front. While in 1828 there had been great uncertainty about how to measure and even how to conceive the insalubrity of water, by the early 1850s ideas of how water might be harmful were converging. Ironically, the impurity that seemed most compatible with the authority of chemistry was decaying matter, precisely the poison around which Chadwick had promoted the sanitary movement. In 1828 Pearson and Gardner had defended the companies' waters on the grounds that they con-

tained no unusually large concentrations of medically active salts and it had been the companies' critics, especially William Lambe, who had seized on decaying organic matter as the harmful constituent and condemned water upon finding traces of organic matter in it.

By 1850 there was widespread acceptance not only of the primacy of decaying matter, but of Chadwick's particular conception of its action. Unlike several other sanitarian writers who took Liebig's view that decomposing matter was harmful because it generated decomposition in the victim's body, Chadwick and his medical theorist Thomas Southwood Smith were mainly concerned with the products of putrefactive decomposition.^[72] These they regarded as poisons which worked either as predisposers in weakening a person's resistance to an exciting cause of disease, or as exciting causes themselves. They were mainly concerned with the malodorous products of anaerobic decay: hydrogen sulphide, phosphoretted hydrogen, some ammonia compounds. In Chadwick's view these compounds, derived either from decomposition taking place in the water, or absorbed from the foul urban atmosphere, constituted the harmful substances in water.

Using adaptations of mineral water chemistry, Brande, Taylor, and Cooper tested for these compounds, especially hydrogen sulphide, which they saw as an exclusive indicator of decayed animal matter and thus of sewage matter, which many sanitarians were beginning to regard as more dangerous than plant matter.^[73] Hydrogen sulphide was easy to detect, qualitatively by its odour or by the black film that formed on silver exposed to it, quantitatively through the formation of a brown precipitate with lead acetate.^[74] Yet Brande, Taylor and company went further, again founding their argument in orthodox Chadwickian medical theory: not only was hydrogen sulphide an indicator of sewage, it was what made sewage dangerous, and therefore they were directly measuring the harmful matter in sewage. Taylor even claimed to have isolated the chemical substance responsible for dysentery.^[75]

It need hardly be said that the quantity of hydrogen sulphide that Taylor and his colleagues found in the water was not enough to condemn it.^[76] Yet just as unsettled questions undermined the reformers' attempts to draw strong conclusions from microscopical evidence, there were also glaring ambiguities in interpreting the hydrogen sulphide results. The results had to be reconciled with the obvious fact that the rivers Thames and Lea received enormous quantities of organic matter in sewage. Much of this organic matter remained

in the water. Water from near the Tower of London (well below any of the intakes) contained eight grains organic matter per gallon, but even the water the West Middlesex company took from near Barnes contained three to four grains.^[77] All this organic matter was not dangerous, insisted Taylor and his associates, since it was either not decomposing or not derived from animal sources (or both). While these answers did forestall serious governmental meddling with the water supply, they did not really resolve the issue of how to measure water quality, even in the context of the sanitary science of the early 1850s.

The confidence and brashness of the companies' chemists contrasts sharply with the sober and tentative conclusions of the only neutral investigation during the controversy, the 1851 report to the Home Secretary by Graham, Miller, and Hofmann. In January 1851, Sir George Grey, the Tory Home Secretary, had consulted the three out of a mounting sense of bewilderment. Buffeted by claims of the dangers and benefits of hard water or animalculae and of the amounts of water that could be obtained from various sources at various costs, he sought the help of the three chemists.^[78] The team followed the analytical protocol Hofmann was establishing at the Royal College of Chemistry with the significant exception of adding an elemental analysis of the organic residue to determine the nitrogen–carbon ratio and hence to estimate how much of the organic matter derived from potentially harmful animal matters, such as sewage, 'the existence of nitrogen . . . being generally supposed to imply . . . animal origin.'^[79] One should not make too much of this: there was still no definitive epidemiological link between disease and human faecal contamination, only a slow shifting of sensibility to the view that among types of filth, some types were significantly more dangerous than others. The London waters contained between three hundredths and one tenth of a grain per gallon of such organic nitrogen—'a minute and probably unimportant portion of animal organic matter,' they concluded.^[80]

While the three chemists found a number of 'serious evil[s]'—hardness, turbidity, contamination with vegetable organic matter—they found greater problems, mainly with respect to quantity, in each of the alternatives, and because of these doubts about the alternatives, their report was taken as an endorsement of the existing supply, though in fact it was highly ambivalent.^[81] One gets the feeling that the chemists were concerned about the water but unable to find an analytical warrant for their concern. Their report nicely

captures the state of water analysis in the early '50s. There was a deep-seated feeling that something was wrong with a great many water supplies. Some believed water contributed somehow to the spread of cholera, others decided the palpable impurities in their water were no longer tolerable, still others simply felt a long-standing anger at being at the mercy of the water monopoly. Yet it was agonizingly unclear which of these problems was most serious, why and how they were serious, and what kinds of remedies were workable. It was not yet clear just what an urban water supply should be, who should control it, how it should be paid for, how water should be distributed, or what standards of quality it ought to meet. Some of the companies' opponents treated water as a necessity of life, and hence a basic human right. The companies, on the other hand, and the government, viewed water supplies as if they were some sort of new category of railway (indeed the agency charged with administering the 1852 Metropolis Water Act was the Board of Trade's Railway Department), that is, as projects in which the public good guided and tempered but did not ultimately control the visions of capitalists.

There was an analogous lack of consensus as to what standards of quality a public water supply ought to meet. W H Wills insisted that 'all chemists agreed that a water containing from eight to ten grains of sulphate of magnesia or soda, to the imperial gallon, is best suited for . . . domestic purposes.'^[82] But even if chemists agreed on that (and many probably did not) they agreed on little else. Water was objected to both as being too impure and too pure: very soft water was objectionable because it might poison the public with lead dissolved from lead pipes. The 1849–52 water controversy, along with those that preceded it and followed it, was thus at its deepest level a problem of determining what a public water supply was to be. The companies' victory in part reflects the fact that they represented the status quo of water supply. Yet it was also due to the acceptance of analytical chemistry over analytical microscopy and the hardness standard. In failing to take seriously the standards and analyses of Chadwick, Hassall, and the other reformers, public and government were acquiescing to the dominance of chemistry—despite great uncertainty about what, if anything, in water might be harmful, despite the shallow, glib, and self-serving performance of the companies' chemists who appeared to have invented something to analyse for, which they could then show to be absent.

To understand why chemical standards and processes should be

so compelling we need to reflect once more on the status of chemistry in the mid nineteenth century. Its stock was high: the body of chemical knowledge had been thoroughly reorganized; discoveries of new elements and compounds, and new explanations of processes—especially the biological processes of respiration, nutrition, and recycling—had made chemical knowledge a far more prestigious part of natural science than it had been a hundred years earlier. Through the efforts of men like Brande, chemistry was becoming increasingly visible in technology and in medicine. Most importantly chemistry was being looked to, especially in biology and medicine, and especially in Britain, as the science that offered the fundamental explanation of phenomena. In an 1851 review of Hassall's Microscopical Examination , Nathaniel Beardmore, the engineer to the River Lea Trust (an organization with a vested interest in the East London Water Company and hence in the existing water supply) wrote that Hassall 'would have done great benefit to science by his facts, if he had given us chemical analyses of the various waters experimented upon, so that the constituent elements of the Fungi, algae, Diatomaceae, etc. should be determined; and we should then have known the chemical nature of the inhabitants of our waters.'^[83]

To most modern readers the argument will seem absurd. It calls for us to sacrifice a specific and detailed knowledge for a far more general knowledge. It embraces the idea that it is only as amounts of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a few other elements, that organisms have significance in the world, and is reminiscent of childish arguments that human beings are worth the prices of the trace elements their bodies contain. Yet Beardmore's suggestion is nothing more than a brazen version of Brande's 1851 statement that it made absolutely no difference whether the organic matter in water was alive or not, and in gentler form it was the perspective of most of the chemists who testified. To them health and disease were states of chemistry, chiefly of the chemistry of decaying organic matter and the products it yielded.