Christopher Hamlin
Department of History

Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain. Bristol, England, and Berkeley, CA: Adam Hilger, Ltd/University of California Press. 1990.

"A Science of Impurity explores the social framework in which chemists came to work on problems of water quality in nineteenth century Britain, the strategies they used to study the environment, the principles on which they drew their conclusions and the role they adopted in dealing with a fearful public. From the chemical quackery of mineral water analysis in the late eighteenth century to the seamy side of London's water politics in the nineteenth, the author presents a wealth of engrossing social and scientific detail."

"The issues raised in A Science of Impurity are still of great interest to us, and the book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the use of scientific expertise in public decision-making."

"a novel approach, using description and interpretation as a means of mediating complex controversies that have characterized agricultural policy in the United States over the last two decades. Offering the only systematic analysis of the ideologies behind U.S. agricultural controversy during the 1970s and 1980s, the book focuses on the work of Wendell Berry and Charles Walters, Jr., as representing divergent approaches to alternative agriculture, and on a report of the Battelle Memorial Institute, Agriculture 2000, as representing the position of conventional agriculture. Through in-depth analyses of the images and assumptions that underlie discussions of agricultural issues, the authors provide a basis for those with conflicting views on agricultural policy to make sense of one another's perspectives.

The opening chapters review the polarized state of agricultural controversy, pinpoint the oversimplifications of opposing scientific and normative stances, and explore the clash of competing contexts that contribute to mutual misunderstandings. Three characteristic ideologies are systematically compared, and the concluding chapters look closely at how these ideologies are expressed in the context of a policy hearing or embedded in research agendas for agriculture."

The 1830s and 1840s are the formative years of modern public health in Britain, when the poor law bureaucrat Edwin Chadwick conceived his vision of public health through public works and began the campaign for the construction of the kinds of water and sewerage works that ultimately became standard components of urban infrastructure throughout the developed world. This book first explores that vision and campaign against the backdrop of the great "condition-of-England" questions of the period, of what rights and expectations working people could justifiably have in regard to political participation, food, shelter, and conditions of work. It examines the ways Chadwick's sanitarianism fit the political needs of the much hated Poor Law Commission and of Whig and Tory governments, each seeking some antidote to revolutionary Chartism. It then reviews the Chadwickians' efforts to solve the host of problems they met in trying to implement the sanitary idea: of what responsibilities central and local units of government, and private contractors, were to have; of how townspeople could be persuaded to embark on untried public technologies; of where the new public health experts were to come from; and of how elegant technical designs were to be fitted to the unique social, political, and geographic circumstances of individual towns.

Rejecting the view that Chadwick's program was a simple response to an obvious urban problem, Professor Hamlin argues that at the time a "public health" focusing narrowly on sanitary public works represented a retreat of public medicine from involvement with the great social issues of the industrial revolution. In exploring the views of medical men who were critical of Chadwick - the Scottish poor law reformer William Pulteney Alison, the epidemiologist William Farr, the medical politician Thomas Wakley, as well as others active in the fever-hospital and factory-reform campaigns - Hamlin suggests the parameters of a public health that might have been, in which concern for health and well being becomes the foundation of public medicine that is a principal guarantor of social justice. As well as reintegrating Chadwick's "public health" with its social, cultural, and political contexts, this book offers modern public health professionals elements of a forgotten professional heritage that may be useful in responding to the bewildering range of health problems we now confront.