A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain by Christopher Hamlin

Abstract

164 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE there was no serious support for evolution in Britain before Origin of Species, just as he underestimates the role in early-Victorian cultural history of critics of material progress through technology. Nor does he put religion in its proper place when he states summarily and far too simply that “the conservative Anglicans who controlled Oxford, Cambridge and the medical schools used the idea of divine creation to legitimise a static, hierarchical society” (p. 136). The higher criticism of the Bible is left out of the cultural mix; and so, too, except when he deals with the “record of the rocks,” are almost all the great writers of Victorian England who had more of interest to say on the place of science in culture than some of the forgotten characters, English and foreign, whom he has paraded in his pages. Nonetheless, this is a book to read and argue about. Bowler is at his best in dealing with the late-Victorian years and when he is concerning himself with “racist myths”; and his epilogue, like his introduction, should be compulsory reading. Asa Briggs Dr. Briggs is provost of Worcester College, Oxford University. A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain. By Christopher Hamlin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. xiii + 342; illustrations, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $39.95. When Ibsen’s medical officer, Dr. Stockmann, became an enemy of the people in 1883, it was for analyzing the water of the pump room he superintended and claiming it to be polluted by sewage. Stock­ mann soon found himself embroiled in adversarial community poli­ tics. He is told by his self-interested burgomaster brother that the issue at stake is not one of science but of economics and technology. Although Ibsen’s interest in An Enemy ofthe People was in attacking the conformity and insularity of the “compact majority,” as Christopher Hamlin shows in this fine book, water analysis always involved “political” decisions by experts. A Science of Impurity works at two levels: on the one hand it is an excellent, readable history of water analysis and its changing tech­ niques in Victorian Britain; on the other hand it is a stimulating critical account of the development of public decision making on water quality and the roles of scientific experts in aiding society to reach what are essentially local or national political decisions. Throughout the 19th century, analysis was a battlefield between those who used chemical analysis to defend the potability and harmlessness of existing river water supplies and those who used them to condemn water even when physical evidence or plain TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 165 common sense suggested that they might be harmless. The arguments also turned on the hardness or softness of water elucidated by Thomas Clark’s test, and Arthur Hassall’s sensational and unpalatable reports of microscopic fauna in domestic supplies. Hamlin is careful to point out that before the appearance of Liebig’s zymotic theory of disease in the 1840s, “bad” water was seen as a predisposing factor, not a cause, of disease. Liebig’s concept of fermentation transferred attention to the potentiality of water to putrefy from the presence of organic nitrogen from sewage contamination. In 1867, Edward Frankland, the main protagonist of Hamlin’s study, devised a compli­ cated combustion analysis that produced an estimate of “previous sewage contamination.” Despite the serious objections to Frankland’s very clever terminology, which implied there was something harmful in the water when, chemically, the results actually suggested that a process of purification had taken place, Frankland used analyses as strategic weapons for social action. As an unofficial government water analyst and despite fierce controversy with his former pupil, Alfred Wanklyn, over the alternative “albuminoid ammonia” method and with other analysts who used permanganate, Frankland succeeded brilliantly in pushing local authorities into cleaning up rivers, munic­ ipalizing private water companies, and recommending fresh sources of supply. His pragmatic emphasis on the prior history of water turned out to be the essential link between chemical and bacteriolog­ ical analysis. By 1885 Frankland’s son, Percy Edward Frankland, was persuaded that sand filtration, as practiced by a...