Worrying about Germs, 1878–86

By 1880 British sanitarians and water analysts were becoming increasingly concerned about their inability to measure water-borne germs. Although many British sanitarians in the '70s were doubtless aware of the spontaneous generation debates, of Lister's ideas about wound sepsis and its prevention, and of the identification of the anthrax organism, most of the talk about germs was loose talk—one could talk about germs of diseases without having to give up talking about products of putrefaction or obscure fermentations. In the late '60s and early '70s it was not clear that germs were bacteria, and they are better understood as something akin to point atoms of morbific force.^[5] Furthermore, all the alternative causes of zymotic disease were tightly bound up with one another, and people might be talking at one and the same time on multiple levels of explanation and about various classes of causes—predisposing or exciting; necessary or sufficient. And finally, since it was not clear that the choice of morbid poison held out any significant practical implications for the conduct of epidemiological investigations or disinfection campaigns, there was little to prevent the loose talk

from remaining loose. The move from vague talk of germs to disciplined discourse about bacteria—the reification of the germ theory into bacteriology—occurred not overnight as the result of any discovery, but slowly, as the boundaries of a metaphor became ever more circumscribed. And as germs became more tangible, sanitarians slowly learned to reinterpret old conceptions and rules of thumb in bacterial terms. Sewer gas, for example, might be conceived not as pathogenic in itself but as a vehicle which transferred germs from sewage to air.^[6] Even in the early '80s there remained a great deal of barely bounded speculation about the nature of germs. Nevertheless, many sanitarians were coming to share Edward Frankland's perspective that germs were extraordinarily elusive and that it was wise not to put quite so much confidence in water analyses.

Such discussions took place in a variety of forums. Germs remained a central issue in legal and Parliamentary inquiries into questions of pollution, sewage treatment, and the acquisition of new municipal water supplies. They also came to be a central issue in discussions about water-purification technologies. Prior to 1884 they were not discussed with reference to water analysis as much as one might expect: water analysts remained too much caught up with the possibility of refining their chemistry or with finding some combination of chemical processes that might allow one to guarantee that a water was safe.^[7]

It is worth briefly examining some of these sites of germ-discussion to recognize how far removed from the context of analysis discussions of water-borne germs were. An example of the first of these contexts is the consideration by a Commons select committee of the Cheltenham Corporation water bill in March 1878. The bill was promoted by Cheltenham to allow it to purchase the private water company which was then supplying it, to avoid imposition of a supply drawn from the polluted River Severn, and to obtain a new water supply of high purity. Much of the testimony dealt with the threat the Severn posed to the health of Cheltenham residents, i.e., with the question of whether it was possible or likely that germs put into the river by upstream towns would survive long enough to infect the town. Frankland was one of the expert witnesses for Cheltenham. He maintained that analysis did not allow one to distinguish the important 'physiological impurities [living germs].' He told of his experiments during the 1866 cholera epidemic. He insisted that the scientific world now accepted the germ theory, noted that the research of Pasteur and Koch had confirmed it in the case of anthrax,

and declared that no member of the Royal Society would think of denying the existence of germs. In cross-examination Sir Edmund Beckett, one of the ablest members of the parliamentary bar, pressed Frankland to admit that the cholera germ was nothing but a theory; Frankland termed it an undiscovered fact. 'Have you got any evidence yet of the germ theory?' Beckett asked. 'You have been preaching this doctrine for ever so long . . . trying it on, in committee after committee.'^[8] Medical witnesses testifying for Cheltenham also took the Frankland line. William Thursfield, E Thomas Wilson, Thomas Wright, and Alfred Hill maintained that analysis was not to be trusted, that no distance of flow would necessarily remove all 'infective particles' or 'medical infection,' or 'centres of infection,' or 'living matter.'^[9]

Similar arguments about undetectable poisons had been made as far back as 1850 and the claims Frankland made about the characteristics of germs were basically the claims he had made in 1868. Such claims were not significantly strengthened by the research on anthrax or by any other bacteriological discoveries, and they would remain only plausible speculations until there were convincing demonstrations of the existence and nature of germs of water-borne diseases. To those like Beckett, who argued the opposing case, Frankland's claims were no less outrageous in 1878 than they had been a decade earlier. As late as 1886, Charles Meymott Tidy, Frankland's nemesis, was still doubting the reality of germs: 'People talk about germs very freely, . . . as though these things had been got hold of,' Tidy observed to a select committee on the condition of the River Lea. He demanded that the so-called cholera germ be put on the table before him before he would acknowledge its existence.^[10]

A second context in which there was increasing talk of germs was with regard to water purification, both natural purification in rivers and artificial purification in filters. Especially important are the discussions following Tidy's March 1880 paper on the self-purification of rivers and William Anderson's 1882 paper on the 'Antwerp Water Works,' presented at the Institution of Civil Engineers. Tidy's paper was part of his campaign to discredit Frankland's water science. As he typically did when raising the germ issue, Tidy bemoaned its speculativeness. When talk turned to germs we were leaving 'the region of direct experiment, . . . plung[ing] headlong into theories . . . diving deeper and deeper into mere speculation when we discuss the laws governing the life of organised bodies, the very existence of which at present is unproved.'^[11]

In fact Tidy wielded speculations as ably as anyone. He tried to make the image of germs as exceedingly delicate at least as plausible as Frankland's image of exceptionally hardy germs. Germs were 'so low in the scale of life that they [would] . . . very soon suffer complete destruction by the bursting of their envelopes owing to the powerful endosmic action of the water in which they are immersed.'^[12]

In light of the discoveries of the next few years that the germs of cholera and typhoid were in fact fairly fragile, Tidy's speculations can seem prescient, just as Frankland's were in 1866–68. But one could equally argue that in light of what was known of the hardiness of the spore-forming anthrax bacillus (the most important disease germ known at the time), Tidy's belief in fragile bacteria was wholly unwarranted. What is striking about the 1880 discussion (and the 1878 Cheltenham hearings) is the continued hypotheticality of germs. Frankland and Tidy paid little attention to the growing output of bacteriological science; they continued to make self-serving assumptions and to manipulate hypotheses drawn from them; it was scholastic disputation in its most barren form. While Frankland made an effort to ground some of his positions in experiment—he found, for example, that bacteria (species unstated) survived perfectly well in aerated water—his bacteriological experiments were exceedingly crude.

Two years later, when bacteriological aspects of water filters were discussed at the Institution of Civil Engineers, there was at least agreement about the proper terms of the question. William Anderson, an engineer, was involved with the chemist Gustav Bischof and with Frankland in a scheme for filtering Antwerp's water through Bischof's patent 'spongy iron' filters, which were supposedly germicidal. Frankland believed that a germicidal medium was necessary since germs might be 'too subtle' (too tiny) to be removed by ordinary filter media. He himself used such a filter to protect his family from the London water he regularly condemned.^[13] Those who spoke agreed that the effect of spongy iron on microbes was the relevant question, and that answering it depended on the availability of means for detecting germs. Samuel Homersham and Jabez Hogg claimed that cultures of filtrate showed that spongy iron did not, in fact, kill all bacteria. Bischof replied by questioning the validity of gelatine cultures, while Anderson cast doubt on the bacteriological skills of Hogg and Robert Angus Smith, who had done the cultures. This brief exchange was a hint of what was to come in the next fifteen years: water analysts became as expert at raising doubts about one

another's bacteriological technique as they had been at criticizing one another's chemical processes.^[14]

On the few occasions during these years when 'germs' made their way into discussions on water analysis they again produced more heat than light. In 1881 Charles Folkard presented a paper on 'The Analysis of Potable Waters with Special Reference to Previous Sewage Contamination' at the Institution of Civil Engineers. Folkard, an assistant in the School of Mines, dealt with the topic in an elementary fashion, reviewing the major processes for an audience of engineers.^[15] He closed with an image of what germs might be, much like the one Frankland had presented to the Water Supply Commission in 1868. One could plausibly imagine germs able to withstand any process of purification one cared to think of: whether filters (germs might be small enough to go through '1000 abreast'), chemical precipitation (germs might not be affected owing to their 'great vitality'), or sewage irrigation (germs might go through fissures into tile drains); science could supply no anodyne to any of these awful possibilities. In the discussion Tidy attacked Folkard's one-sided speculations with his usual plea for positivism: 'one could no more analyse a water for the germ of typhoid, than one could analyse the brain for an idea. Not only . . . did the Author speak of germs as though they were tangible, but he had fixed the conditions of the life of a thing the very existence of which had never been proved.'^[16] Folkard retaliated by accusing Tidy of pigheaded empiricism: Tidy based his conclusions on analysis of 'four thousand samples,' done by 'a process admitted by nine-tenths of the analysts of the present day to be worthless.'^[17] Leaving aside the initiative of the Society of Public Analysts, this bitter and sterile exchange exemplifies British water science of the early '80s. Chemical analysis had been taken as far as it seemed useful to go (and possibly further); the detection of disease germs was seen as the way of the future but there were as yet no germs to detect nor any means of detecting them.^[18]