Irrigation as a Menace to Health in California: A Nineteenth Century View

Abstract

Aversion to wet places has a long history for western man, and it is probably rooted in the ancient Greek etiology of disease. Wet, poorly drained places with abundant surface water, especially if they are also low-lying, have generally been avoided as permanent sites for settlement, and even their proximity has sometimes been shunned. Such avoidance is in large part rational, deriving from direct limitations of the environment, but avoidance of wet places for less direct, and often less rational, reasons has occurred. Intermingled with purely superstitious reasons for avoidance is the discouraging and perplexing association of disease with damp locations. Many kinds of disease are involved, including a number linked with impure water supplies. But by far the most important disease connected with wet places is malaria. It was an imperfect comprehension of this disease that gave rise to concern in California in the nineteenth century. Apprehensions arose that the vaunted salubrity of the California climate might suffer from the harmful side effects of irrigation agriculture.