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Abstract

Drawing on recent interest in the environmental impacts of cities, and in the urban metabolism, this article examines efforts in late-eighteenth-century France and mid-nineteenth-century Britain to understand cities primarily as chemical systems, and accordingly, to see urban management as properly the province of the chemist. Drawing on historical-sociological studies of professionalization, the article also contrasts the failure of chemists to acquire cognitive authority over the city with the greater degrees of success of other professions: architecture; engineering; medicine; and the practitioners of the new entity, “urban planning,” which came into existence at the end of the nineteenth century.

Keywords

chemistry as profession urban planning recycling expert witnessing nuisances

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References

See David Satterthwaite, ed., The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities ( London , 1999); Michael Hough , Cities and Natural Process ( London , 1995); and S. Boyden , An Integrative Ecological Approach to the Study of Human Settlements ( Paris , 1979), Man and the Biosphere [MAB] Technical Notes 12. Joel Tarr traces the term urban metabolism to the environmental engineer Abel Wolman (“The Metabolism of the Industrial City: The Case of Pittsburgh ,” Journal of Urban History 28 [2002]: 511-45 , on 512). For reconstructions of urban metabolisms, see the work of Sabine Barles, for example, “ L'invention des eaux usées: l'assainissement de Paris, de la fin de l'Ancien Régime à la seconde guerre mondiale ,” in Christoph Bernhardt and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud , eds., The Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies ( Clermont-Ferrand , 2002), 129-56 . For its textbook penetration, see J.R. McNeill , Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World ( New York , 2000), esp. 292. For its use among modern urban environmental scientists, see L. Sörme , B. Bergbäck , and U. Lohm , “ Century Perspective of Heavy Metal Use in Urban Areas: A Case Study in Stockholm ,” Water, Air, and Soil Pollution: Focus 1 (2001): 197-211 .

It is sometimes suggested (e.g., Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present [Baltimore, 2000], 7-14) that an ecological approach to the city has been (and must be) underwritten by a mature environmental science. While post—World War II developments in analytic techniques were important, the concept of the city as a chemical system was not dependent on them.

See Anthony Sutcliffe , “Introduction: British Town Planning and the Historian,” in Anthony Sutcliffe , ed., British Town Planning: The Formative Years ( Leicester , 1981), 2-14, esp. 6-10. Cf. Walter Creese , The Garden City: Before and after ( New Haven , 1966 ); Helen Meller , Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner ( London , 1990); Robert Fishman , Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century ( New York , 1977); Kermit Parsons and David Schuyler , eds., From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard ( Baltimore , 2002); Dennis Hardy , From New Towns to Green Politics: Campaigning for Town and Country Planning, 1946-1990 ( London , 1991); and Volker Welter , Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life ( Cambridge, MA , 2002). For a contrasting, evolutionary view, see William Ashworth , The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning: A Study in Economic and Social History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ( London , 1954). Town planning in France, and particularly in Germany, took a quite different course. For a comparative history, see Anthony Sutcliffe , Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States, and France, 1780-1914 ( New York , 1981).

For a classic study of animate impact on the urban environment, see Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr , “ The Centrality of the Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City ,” in Raymond Mohl, ed., The Making of Urban America , 2nd ed. ( Wilmington, DE , 1977), 105-30 . On industry, see Joel Tarr , “ Industrial Waste Disposal in the United States as a Historical Problem ,” Ambix 49 (2002): 4-20 .

Charles Baskerville , “ Sanitation and the City,” in Charles Baskerville , ed., Municipal Chemistry ( New York: McGraw Hill , 1910), 1-19, on 1, 5.

O.E. Norman , The Romance of the Gas Industry ( Chicago , 1922), 29-31, 134-35; Charles Hunt, A. History of the Introduction of Gas Lighting ( London , 1907).

Colin Russell , with Noel G. Coley , and Gerrylynn K. Roberts , Chemists by Profession: The Origins and Rise of the Royal Institute of Chemistry ( Milton Keynes , 1977), 31-44 provides an excellent overview.

Third Report of the Commissioners Appointed in 1868 to Inquire into the Best Means of Preventing the Pollution of Rivers (Pollution from the Woollen Industry), Evidence. P.P., 1871, 25 [c.-347-I.]; and Third Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Best Means of Preventing the Pollution of Rivers (Rivers Aire and Calder) V. 1 Report. P.P., 1867, 33 [3850]. See also Lawrence Breeze, The British Experience with River Pollution, 1865-1876 (New York, 1993); Sarah Wilmot, “Pollution and Public Concern: The Response of the Chemical Industry in Britain to Emerging Environmental Issues, 1860-1901,” in Ernst Homburg, Anthony Travis, and Harm Schröter, eds., The Chemical Industry in Europe, 1850-1914: Industrial Growth, Pollution, and Professionalization (Dordrecht, 1998), 121-47. For problems with aerial pollution from related industries, see Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, The Politics of Clean Air (Oxford, 1981); and Peter Reed, “Robert Angus Smith and the Alkali Inspectorate” in Homburg, Travis, and Schröter, The Chemical Industry in Europe, 149-63.

Stephen Mosley , The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester ( Cambridge , 2001); B.J. Clapp , An Environmental History of Britain since the Industrial Revolution ( London , 1994); and Peter Brimblecombe , The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times ( London , 1987).

10.

Maximilian Toch , “ Cement and Concrete” and “Corrosion of Iron and Steel ,” in Baskerville, Municipal Chemistry , 470-96 , 453-56 .

11.

C.A. Browne , “ The Life and Chemical Services of Frederick Accum,” Journal of Chemical Education 2 (1925): 829-51 , 1008-35 , 1140-48 .

12.

Harvey Wiley , “ The Remedy for Food Adulteration and the Relation of Chemistry Thereto,” in Baskerville, Municipal Chemistry, 127-35, on 127. Wiley would come to hold the post of chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the United States Department of Agriculture .

13.

This, I argue, was the view of Edwin Chadwick (Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain 1800-1854 [ Cambridge , 1998]). See also Donald Reid , Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations ( Cambridge, MA , 1991).

14.

There are two other important loci, which will not be discussed here. A chemistry, largely of rural economic development, was prominent in late-eighteenth-century Scotland. See Archibald Clow and Nan Clow , The Chemical Revolution: A Contribution to Social Technology ( London , 1952). Chemistry also acquired prominence in America from 1890 to 1940: a result of Progressivism, the confiscation of German patents during the First World War and the corresponding growth of the American chemical industry, and the chemurgy movement of the 1930s. Arnold Thackray , Jeffrey Sturchio , P. Thomas Carroll , and Robert Bud , Chemistry in America, 1876-1976: Historical Indicators ( Dordrecht , 1985), 99-103.

15.

A.F. Fourcroy , “ Sur les différens États des Cadavres trouvées dans les feuilles du Cimitière des Innocens en 1786 et 1787 , Annales de Chimie 5 (1790): 154-85 ; idem, “ Deuxieme Memoire sur les matières animales trouvées dans le Cimitière des Innocens à Paris ,” Annales de Chimie 8 (1791): 17-73 ; Richard Etlin , The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris ( Cambridge, MA , 1984), 13-17 , 30-33 ; and John McManners , Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France ( Oxford , 1981). More broadly, see Lawrence Brockliss and Colin Jones , The Medical World of Early Modern France ( Oxford , 1997 ).

16.

E.H. Guitard , Le Prestigeux Passé des Eaux Minerales ( Paris , 1951).

17.

Much of this work is in vol. 3 of Oeuvres de Lavoisier, 6 vols . ( Paris , 1865; rpt., New York , 1965). See also Douglas McKie , Antoine Lavoisier: Scientist, Economist, Social Reformer ( New York , 1962). Chemists were by no means preoccupied with the city alone; military problems were more important during and after the revolution.

18.

N. Dhombres , Les Savants en Révolution 1789-1799 ( Paris , 1989), 54-58; N. and J. Dhombres , Naissance d'un Nouveau Pouvoir: Sciences et Savants en France 1793-1824 ( Paris , 1989), 28-37; Charles Coulston Gillespie , Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime ( Princeton , 1980), 178-82; idem, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years ( Princeton , 2004); a n d W.A. Smeaton , Fourcroy, Chemist and Revolutionary, 1755-1809 ( Cambridge , 1962).

19.

L.B. Guyton de Morveau , Treatise on the Means of Purifying Infected Air, of Preventing Contagion, and Arresting Its Progress , translated by R. Hall ( London , 1802), 179-209 ; and A.F. de Fourcroy , “ Mémoire sur l'Application de la Chimie Pneumatique à l'Art de Guérir, et sur les Propriétés Médicamenteuses des Substances Oxigénées ,” Annales de Chimie 28 (l'an VII [ 1798]): 225-81 . See also Alain Corbin , The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination ( Cambridge, MA , 1986 ), 69-70 . On moral contagia, see Jan Goldstein , “ `Moral Contagion': A Professional Ideology of Medicine and Psychiatry in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France ,” in Gerald Geison, ed., Professions and the French State, 1700-1900 ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press , 1984), 181-222 .

20.

Maurice Crosland , The Society of Arcueil: A View of French Science at the Time of Napoleon I ( Cambridge, MA , 1967); and Dhombres and Dhombres, Naissance d'un Nouveau Pouvoir.

21.

William Coleman , Death Is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France ( Madison , 1982); Ann La Berge , Mission and Method: The Early-Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement ( Cambridge , 1992); and E.H. Ackerknecht , “ Hygiene in France, 1815-1848 ,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22 (1948): 117-55 .

22.

Charles Kingsley , “ Great Cities and Their Influence for Good and Evil ,” in his Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays ( London , 1889), 187-222 , on 191 .

23.

Charles Kingsley , “ The Air-Mothers ,” in his Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays, 131-63 , on 142 .

24.

Graeme Davison , “The City as a Natural System: Theories of Urban Sociology in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe , eds., The Pursuit of Urban History ( London , 1983), 349-70. For the continued prominence of these ideas in the London housing controversies of the 1870s and 1880s, see Gareth Stedman Jones , Outcast London: A Study of the Relationship between the Classes in Victorian Society ( New York , 1971).

25.

T.R. Malthus , An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness; With an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions. The version published in 1803, with the variora of 1806, 1807, 1817, and 1826, edited by Patricia James , 2 vols. ( Cambridge , 1989), 1:bk. 1 chaps. 2, 18. See also bk. 1 chaps. 6, 72; bk. 2, chaps. 2, 162.

26.

John Weyland , The Principles of Population and Production as They Are Affected by the Progress of Society with View to Moral and Political Consequences (1816 ; rpt., New York , 1969), 422-27. For similar views, see George Ensor , An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations: Containing a Refutation of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population ( London , 1818), 338; Piercy Ravenstone, A Few Doubts as to the Correctness of Some Opinions Generally Entertained on the Subjects of Population and Political Economy (1821; rpt., New York , 1966), 84-90; and Simon Gray , The Happiness of States; or, an Inquiry Concerning Population, the Modes of Subsisting and Employing It, and the Effects of All on Human Happiness ( London , 1815), 351-52.

27.

Robert Kargon , Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise ( Baltimore , 1977), esp. chaps. 4, 5; and Arnold Thackray , “ Natural Knowledge in Its Cultural Context: The Manchester Model ,” American Historical Review 74 (1979): 672-709 . On German chemists, see Russell, Coley , and Roberts, Chemists by Profession, 40 .

28.

W.H. Brock , Justus von Liebig , the Chemical Gatekeeper ( Cambridge , 1997); and Aaron Ihde , The Development of Modern Chemistry ( New York , 1964), 431-32.

29.

Lyon Playfair , in discussion of W. Fothergill Cooke , “ On the Utilisation of the Sewage of Towns by the Deodorisation Process Established at Leicester, and on the Economical Application of It to the Metropolis ,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 5 (1856): 56 .

30.

Frederick Gregory , Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany ( Dordrecht , 1977). On Liebig's theology, see Otto Sontag , “ Religion and Science in the Thought of Liebig ,” Ambix 24 (1977): 159-69 .

31.

On chemico-theology, see D.C. Goodman , “ Chemistry and the Two Organic Kingdoms of Nature in the Nineteenth Century ,” Medical History 16 (1972): 113-30 ; and Christopher Hamlin , “ Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease ,” in Patrick Brantlinger , ed., Energy and Entropy: Victorian Science and Culture ( Bloomington , 1988), 93-123 . Also see J.T. Way , “ On the Power of Soils to Absorb Manure ,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society 11 ( 1850): 313-79 ; C.G.B. Daubeny , “ On Ozone ,” Journal of the Chemical Society 20 (1867): 1-28 ; and C.B. Fox , Ozone and Antozone: Their History and Nature: When, Where, Why, How Is Ozone Observed in the Atmosphere ? ( London , 1873). Ozone was also suspected of causing cholera in being too active an oxidizer (“The Atmosphere and Disease: The Ozone Theories,” The Builder, September 23, 1854, 49798 ; and “ Electricity and Its Alleged Connection with Diseases ,” ibid., November 11, 1854, 580-82 ).

32.

Charles Hall , The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States; with Observations on the Principal Conclusion in Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population ( 1805; rpt., New York , 1965), 286-87; and Michael Sadler , The Law of Population, Being a Treatise in Six Books, in Disproof of the Superfecundity of Human Beings, and Developing the Real Principle of Their Increase, 2 vols. ( London , 1830), 1: 95-96. Marx attached great importance to such a process. John Bellamy Foster , Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature ( New York , 2000), 147-62.

33.

“ Report on the Sanitary Condition of Large Towns in Lancashire ,” Royal Commission on the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts , Second Report, P.P., 1845, 18 , Appendix, pt. 2, 46-47 . For other examples, see W. Bridges Adams , “ On the Chemical Purification of Towns ,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 3 (1854): 644-45 ; and “ The `Cloaca Maxima' of the `Metropolis Magna' ,” The Builder 33 (1875): 1073-76 .

34.

“ On an Improved Mode of Collecting Human Voidings, with a View to Their Application for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Reduction of Local Taxation ,” Select Committee on Sewage (Metropolis), P.P., 1864, 14, (487.), Appendix, 299-314 . See also Eduard Seiden , Die Menschlichen Excremente in national-öconomischer, hygienischer, finanzieller und landwirthschaftlicher Beziehung ( Hanover , 1882).

35.

“ The Farmer of Tiptree Hall ,” Household Words 5 (1852): 477-82 . See also “ Mechi the Mourner ,” Punch 35 (1858): 75 .

36.

Hugo's declaration is in Les Misérables (1862), vol. 5, bk. 2, chap. 1. On Paris, see Reid, Sewers and Sewermen; A. Durand-Claye , “ Sewage and Its Utilisation for Agricultural Purposes in France and Abroad ,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 22 (1873): 67-73 ; and F. Target , “ On the Main Drainage of Paris ,” Minutes of Proceedings, Institution of Civil Engineers 53 (1877): 209-11 . On Berlin , see H.A. Roechling , “ The Sewage Farms of Berlin ,” Minutes of Proceedings, Institution of Civil Engineers 109 (1892): 232-68 . On Mill, see Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy , in V. W. Bladen and J. M. Robson , eds., Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols . ( Toronto , 1965), 2:bk. 2, chap. 6. For America, see Ted Steinberg , “ Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History ,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 798-820 .

37.

Robert Angus Smith , “On the Air and Water of Towns,” Eighteenth Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1848 ( London , 1849), 16-22.

38.

Playfair, “Report on the Sanitary Condition of Large Towns in Lancashire,” 47-48, 57, 71; Thomas Southwood Smith , in First Report of the Royal Commission on the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts , P.P., 1844, 17, [572.], Evidence, qq. 934-35; and Charles Kingsley , “ Great Cities and Their Influence for Good and Evil,” 201-2. See idem, “ The Tree of Knowledge,” in Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays, 167-83, on 178. See also Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice, chap. 6. The roots of this view lay in the Scottish union of medicine with philosophy. The state of the nervous system was a function of its contact with matter. Over- or understimulation, or stimulation by the wrong things, adversely affected the sensorium. See Christopher Lawrence , “Medicine as Culture: Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment” (PhD diss., University of London , 1984), 143, 210-15, 376-86, 431-39.

39.

B.W. Richardson , “ Health and Civilisation ,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 23 (1874-1875): 948-54 ; and idem, 24 ( 1875-1876): 914 . Richardson later changed his mind on cremation. See also Annmarie Adams , Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 ( Montreal , 1996), chap. 1.

40.

G.E. Fussell , “ Sewage Irrigation Farms in the Nineteenth Century ,” Agriculture 64 (1957-1958): 138-41 ; Nicholas Goddard , “ Nineteenth Century Recycling: The Victorians and the Agricultural Use of Sewage ,” History Today 31 (June 1981): 32-36 ; idem, “` A Mine of Wealth'? The Victorians and the Agricultural Use of Sewage ,” Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 274-90 ; and Christopher Hamlin , What Becomes of Pollution? Adversary Science and the Controversy on the Self-Purification of Rivers in Britain ( New York , 1987 ).

41.

Dorothy Porter , “` Enemies of the Race': Biologism, Environmentalism, and Public Health in Edwardian England ,” Victorian Studies 34 (1991): 159-78 ; and Patricia Garside, “`Unhealthy Areas': Town Planning, Eugenics, and the Slums, 1890-1945 ,” Planning Perspectives 3 (1988): 24-46 .

42.

Andrew Abbott , The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor ( Chicago , 1988 ), 54-57.

43.

Brian Keith-Lucas , The Unreformed Local Government System ( London , 1980); Andrew Russell , ed., The Town and State Physician in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Wolfenbüttel, 1981 ); and Christopher Hamlin , “Public Sphere to Public Health: The Transformation of `Nuisance',” in Steve Sturdy , ed., Medicine, Health, and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1600-2000 ( London , 2002), 190-204.

44.

James C. Riley , The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease ( London , 1987); Patrick Carroll , “ Medical Police and the History of Public Health ,” Medical History 46 (2002): 461-94 . Fourcroy, “ Mémoire sur l'Application de la Chimie Pneumatique à l'Art de Guérir ”; and George Rosen , “ The Fate of the Concept of Medical Police, 1780-1890 ” in his From Medical Police to Social Medicine: Essays on the History of Health Care ( New York , 1974), 142-58 . In his six-volume System einer vollständingen medicinischen Polizey (1779-1819), the Austrian physician Johan Peter Frank had little room for chemistry. The scope of medical police included reproduction and fertility (two volumes), diet, personal habits, public amusements, healthy buildings, public safety (from accident prevention to the injuries supposedly inflicted by witches), safe interment, and regulation of the medical profession. Several of these were more state than urban issues. A System of Complete Medical Police: Selections from Johann Peter Frank, edited with an introduction by Erna Lesky ( Baltimore , 1976). While the English sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick relied heavily on the chemists Playfair and Angus Smith, and disparaged the expertise of medical men and laymen by contrast, he had too much faith in his own multivalent expertise to see need for any independent profession.

45.

The work of these chemist doctors is discussed in Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth Century Britain (Bristol and Berkeley, 1990). Their influence did not last— the second generation of medical officers, coming to their positions in the 1890s, emphasized epidemiology and statistics rather than chemistry. See John Eyler , Sir Arthur Newsholme and State Medicine, 1885-1935 ( Cambridge , 1997).

46.

“ Organisation amongst Chemists ,” Chemical News 33 (1876): 89-90 . Some of the jobs chemists did also stretched common recognitions of boundaries. Thus, public analysts were expected to be competent in medicine, microscopy, and chemistry (Russell, Coley, and Roberts, Chemists by Profession, 107).

47.

For those theorists who see professions as alternatives to ordinary markets, the serving of clients may well be an essential component of the definition. I use the term in a broader sense. See Magali Sarfatti Larson , The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis ( Berkeley , 1977).

48.

Chemistry's multiple loyalties and ambiguous professional status persist and have been remarked on. In the 1950s, “in view of the manifest uneasiness over the professional standing of chemists,” the American Chemical Society commissioned a major study on professional self-image of its members (Albert Elder, “Preface,” in Anselm Strauss and Lee Rainwater, The Professional Scientist: A Study of American Chemists [Chicago, 1962], vi). See also Steve Fuller: during the nineteenth century, chemistry “seemed to backslide from a paradigmatic to a preparadigmatic state, as its research trajectory came to be oriented to government and business concerns” (Thomas Kuhn, A Philosophy for Our Times [Chicago, 2000], 76).

49.

Russell, Coley , and Roberts, Chemists by Profession, chap. 2; Robert Bud and G.K. Roberts , Science versus Practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain ( Manchester , 1984); Morris Berman , Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844 ( Ithaca , 1978); W.A. Campbell , “The Analytical Chemist in Nineteenth Century English Social History” (master's thesis, University of Durham , 1971), 21ff, 168-71.

50.

Guitard, Prestigeux Passé ; Christopher Hamlin , “Chemistry, Medicine, and the Legitimization of English Spas, 1740-1840,” in Roy Porter , ed., The Medical History of Waters and Spas ( London , 1990), 67-81; and Hamlin, A Science of Impurity, chap. 1.

51.

Russell, Coley, and Roberts find twelve London analytic chemists in 1854, forty-six in 1875, seventy-four in 1881, and ninety-eight in 1891 (Chemists by Profession, 104).

52.

[ William Crookes ], “ The Economy of Nitrogen ,” Quarterly Journal of Science, n.s., 8 (1878): 145-66 ; “ The Solution of the Sewage Problem ,” Quarterly Journal of Science, n.s., 3 (1873): 55-73 ; “ [Native Guano Company] ,” Sanitary Record 6 (1877): 352 ; “ Native Guano ,” Sanitary Record, n.s., 3 (1881): 208-9 ; and Hamlin, A Science of Impurity, 182-84 . On Liebig's involvement in London sewage schemes, see “ Liebig's Letter ,” British Medical Journal i, 1859, 70 ; “ Liebig and Sewage Disposal ,” The Builder 23 (1865): 151; and Brock, Justus von Liebig , the Chemical Gatekeeper , 115-82 , 250-72 .

53.

William H. Edwards , “ Street Sanitation, with Some Special References to New York ,” Municipal Chemistry, 222-35 , on 234 . Italics mine.

54.

Accum's involvement with the Gas Light and Coke Company is a good early example (Browne, “The Life and Chemical Services of Fredrick Accum,” 1010-14).

55.

The most outlandish is Frederick Charles Krepp, The Sewage Question: Being a General Review of all Systems and Methods hitherto Employed in Various Cities for Draining Cities and Utilising Sewage: Treated with Reference to Public Health, Agriculture, and National Economy Generally (London, 1867).

56.

Report of the Select Committee on the Public Health Bill and Nuisances Removal Bill, P.P., 1854-1855, 13, (244.). See also Hamlin, “Public Sphere to Public Health.” For these issues in America, see William Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996). For an example of the magnitude of such a case even in a town of modest size, see Market Harborough Local Board, “Materials on Tannery Nuisance,” 1902-1906, Leicestershire Record Office, DE 1387/212/1.

57.

A classic example was the protracted Birmingham Sewage controversy. See J.T. Bunce , A History of the Corporation of Birmingham , 2 vols. (Birmingham, 1877, 1885); “ The Birmingham Sewage Question ,” Sanitary Record 2 (1875): 99; “ Birmingham Sewage Visit ,” Proceedings of the Association of Municipal Engineers and Surveyors 1 (1873): 125-32. See also “ Lea Conservancy v. Hertford and Rivers Pollution Association ,” Sanitary Record, n.s., 5 (1883): 605.

58.

C. Norman Bazalgette , “ The Sewage Question ,” Minutes of Proceedings, Institute of Civil Engineers 48 (1876-1877): 105-250 . See also Christopher Hamlin , “ Environmental Sensibility in Edinburgh, 1839-1840: The `Fetid Irrigation' Controversy ,” Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 311-39 . On catchment districts, see William Ffennel , Robert Rawlinson , and Arthur Whitehead in Select Committee on Sewage ( Metropolis), P.P., 1864, 14: ( 487 .).

59.

Ernest Stieb , with the collaboration of Glenn Sonnedecker, Drug Adulteration in Nineteenth Century Britain ( Madison , 1959).

60.

Wiley , “ Remedy for Food Adulteration,” 131.

61.

“ Butter Analysis in Scotland ,” The Analyst 1 (1876- 1877): 101 , 117 , 119 , 138 ; “ Professor Dittmar and the Analyst ,” Chemical News 34 (1876): 130 ; W.W. Fisher , “ Presidential Address ,” The Analyst 25 (1900): 57-64 ; and A. Wynter Blyth and M. Wynter Blyth , Foods: Their Composition and Analysis, A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Others , 6th ed. ( London , 1909), 21-24 , 32-40 , 582-88 . See also John Burnett , Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day ( Harmondsworth , 1968), 256-62 . On the Society, see R.C. Chirnside and J.H. Hamence , The Practising Chemists: A History of the Society for Analytical Chemistry, 1874-1974 ( London , 1974); and Bernard Dyer and C. Ainsworth Mitchell , The Society of Public Analysts and Other Analytical Chemists, Some Reminiscences of Its First Fifty Years and a Review of Its Activities ( Cambridge , 1932).

62.

Ian A. Burney , “ A Poisoning of No Substance: The Trials of Medico-Legal Proof in Mid-Victorian England ,” Journal of British Studies 38 (1999): 59-92 ; idem, “ Testing Testimony: Toxicology and the Law of Evidence in Early Nineteenth-Century England ,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002): 289-314 ; Giles St. Aubyn, Infamous Victorians: Palmer and Lamson, Two Notorious Poisoners ( London , 1971), 93-96 ; and A.S. Taylor , The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence , 2nd ed., 2 vols. ( Philadelphia , 1873), 1: 10 , 41 . On toxicological analysis, see Campbell , “ Analytical Chemist ,” 107-65. On chemists as expert witnesses generally , see Tal Golan , Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America ( Cambridge MA : 2004).

63.

Christopher Hamlin , “ William Dibdin and the Idea of Biological Sewage Treatment ,” Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 189-218 ; G.C. Clifton , “ The Staff of the Metropolitan Board of Works: 1855-1889: The Development of a Professional Local Government Bureaucracy ” (PhD diss., London School of Economics , 1986), 97, 107-119 ; and Russell, Coley , and Roberts, Chemists by Profession, 99 .

64.

Wiley , “ Remedy for Food Adulteration,” 127, 131.

65.

“ Notes of the Month ,” The Analyst 2 (1877-1878): 34-35 .

66.

“ New Incidents in the Battle for Life ,” The Builder 35 (1877): 899-900 .

67.

“ Organisation amongst Chemists ,” 89-90 . The discussion was sparked by C.D. Alder Wright , “ On the Necessity for Organisation amongst Chemists, for the Purpose of Enhancing Their Professional Status ,” Chemical News 33 (1876): 27-29 . See also “ Organisation among Chemists ,” Chemical News 33 (1876): 190-91 ; and A Public Analyst , “ Organisation among Chemists ,” Chemical News 33 (1876): 200 .

68.

Russell, Coley , and Roberts, Chemists by Profession, 113-27. But see the reaction of the Society of Public Analysts (“ Organization amongst Chemists ,” The Analyst 2 [1877-1878]: 91-92, 109-11; “Notes of the Month,” ibid., 16-17; and A. Dupre, “Anniversary Address ” ibid., 190-95). By 1912, thirty-one of the London County Council's chemists were either associates or fellows of the Institute of Chemistry (Richard Pilcher, A List of Official Chemical Appointments, Compiled by Direction of the Council of the Institute of Chemistry and under the Supervision of the Proceedings Committee, 4th ed. [London, 1912], 60-61).

69.

In the case of water analysis, the contrast with the U.S. experience is intriguing. Compare C. G. Caldwell , “[ Water Analysis Methods ],” Chemical News 54 (1886): 183 ; “ Water Analysis ,” Chemical News 56 (1887): 113 ; “ Water Analysis ,” Chemical News 60 (1889): 203-4 ; and “ The Scope and Methods of Water Analysis ,” British Medical Journal, ii, 1893, 1116-18 . See also Hamlin , A Science of Impurity , chap. 8.

70.

Hamlin, A Science of Impurity, 196-201. There might also be competing gas analyses (Russell, Coley, and Roberts, Chemists by Profession, 99).

71.

Albert Shaw , Municipal Government in Great Britain ( New York , 1895), 3, 7-8. See also J.R. Kellert , “Municipal Socialism, Enterprise and Trading in the Victorian City,” Urban History Yearbook , 1988, 36-45; and Clifton , “The Staff of the Metropolitan Board of Works,” 75-77.

72.

Andrew Lees , “ Perceptions of Cities in Britain and Germany, 1820-1914 ,” in Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, eds., The Pursuit of Urban History ( London , 1983), 151-65 ; Shaw, Municipal Government in Great Britain ; Harold J. Laski, W. Ivor Jennings, and William A. Robson, eds., A Century of Municipal Progress, 1835-1935 ( London , 1935); and Gerry Kearns , “ Private Property and Public Health Reform in England, 1830-1870 ,” Social Science and Medicine 26 ( 1988): 187-99 .

73.

“ [Medical Officers of Health] ,” Sanitary Record, n.s., 5 (1883): 46 . On professionalization in public health, see Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz , “ Cart Before Horse: Theory, Practice and Professional Image in American Public Health, 1870-1920 ,” Journal of the History of Medicine 29 (1974): 55-73 . On the success of medical officers, see Anthony Wohl , Endangered Lives ( Cambridge, MA , 1983); Dorothy Watkin (Porter), “ The English Revolution in Social Medicine, 1889-1911 ” (PhD diss., University of London , 1984); and Dorothy Porter , “ Stratification and Its Discontents: Professionalization and Conflict in the British Public Health Service, 1848-1914 ,” in Elizabeth Fee and Roy Acheson, eds., A History of Education in Public Health: Health That Mocks the Doctors' Rules ( Oxford , 1991), 88-113 .

74.

It may be argued that the emergence of new explanatory schemes in disease causation, in particular the replacement of miasmatic (chemical) explanations of disease by germ-theoretic (biological) explanations explains chemistry's relegation. Rather, following Abbott, what requires explanation is why chemistry failed to colonize bacteriology, which in Britain and France was to a significant degree founded from chemists' theories, problems, and laboratory skills. A number of chemists (notably Pasteur) worked in bacteriology. Among those I examine here, these include Robert Angus Smith and Edward Frankland. Percy Frankland, who was early in his career the leading British water bacteriologist, later became a professor of chemistry at Birmingham. Robert Warrington (the younger), an agricultural chemist, did important work in bacterial soil nitrification. See Robert Angus Smith , “ The Development of Living Germs in Water ,” Sanitary Record, n.s., 4 (1882-1883): 308-9 ; Edward Frankland , “ On Chemical Changes in Their Relation to Microorganisms ,” Chemical News 51 (1885): 78-80 ; Robert Warrington , “ The Chemical Action of Some Micro-Organisms ,” Chemical News 57 (1888): 246 ; idem , “ On the Distribution of the Nitrifying Organism in the Soil ,” Chemical News 54 (1886): 228-29 ; and Percy Frankland and Grace Frankland , Micro-Organisms in Water: Their Significance, Identification, and Removal ( London , 1894). The 1912 list of Official Chemical Appointments includes several for bacteriological chemistry or chemistry and bacteriology (Pilcher, List of Official Chemical Appointments, 92, 97, 99, 102). Similarly, even though much food analysis was microscopical and although the main English pioneer in the field, Arthur Hassall, had been a medical botanist, chemistry was successful in colonizing the post of public analyst. See E.G. Clayton , Arthur Hill Hassall, Physician and Sanitary Reformer ( London , 1908); Ernest Gray , By Candlelight: The Life of Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall, 1817-94 ( London , 1983); Hamlin, A Science of Impurity, chap. 6.

75.

On their achievements, see Martin Hawtree , “ The Emergence of the Town Planning Profession ,” in Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., British Town Planning: The Formative Years ( Leicester , 1981), 75-77 , 100 ; Christopher Hamlin , “ James Newlands and the Bounds of Public Health ,” Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 143 (1994): 117-39 ; P.J. Smith , “ Planning as Environmental Improvement: Slum Clearance in Victorian Edinburgh ,” in Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., The Rise of Modern Urban Planning, 1800-1914 ( New York , 1980), 99-133 ; W.H. Maxwell , British Progress in Municipal Engineering: A Series of Three Lectures ( London , 1904); and Sir James Lemon , Reminiscences of Public Life in Southampton from 1866 to 1900 , revised by F.J.C. Hearnshaw , 2 vols. ( Southampton , 1911 ). On professional rivalry , see “Doctor or Engineer—Which—Sanitary Inspection,” Builder's Weekly Reporter 15 (1872 ): 1238 ; “[ Medical Officers] ,” The Surveyor, and Municipal and County Engineer 5 (1894): 194 ; “ Medical Officers and Their Institute ,” The Surveyor, and Municipal and County Engineer 6 (1894): 76 ; and “ Municipal Surveyors and Medical Officers ,” The Surveyor, and Municipal and County Engineer 5 (1894): 25 . On professionalization, see F.M.L. Thompson , Chartered Surveyors: The Growth of a Profession ( London , 1968), 120, 139-49 .

76.

For a brief review, see Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City, 72-87.

77.

Ebenezer Howard , Garden Cities of Tomorrow ( London , [ 1945]), 48-64, 76, 126.

78.

Patrick Geddes , Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics ( London , 1915), 85, 297-314; and Hawtree , “ The Emergence of the Town Planning Profession,” 65.

79.

Hawtree , “The Emergence of the Town Planning Profession,” 66. See also Sutcliffe , “Introduction: British Town Planning and the Historian,” 2-14. As Hawtree points out (p. 100), municipal engineers carried out most of the schemes under the Town Planning Act.

80.

Hawtree (“The Emergence of the Town Planning Profession,” 71-79) notes the concern of architects to gain professional jurisdiction over town planning. From the standpoint of cultural history, see David Matless , Landscape and Englishness ( London , 1998).

81.

Charles Kingsley , “ Great Cities and Their Influence for Good and Evil,” 214-16.

82.

Dugald Macfadyen , Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning Movement ( Cambridge, MA , 1970), 11.

83.

A.R. Sennett , Garden Cities in Theory and Practice, Being an Amplification of a Paper on the Potentialities of Applied Science in a Garden City, Read before Section F of the British Association, 2 vols. ( London , 1905).

84.

Abbott, The System of Professions, 8-9.

85.

Ibid., 9, 30 , 70 .

86.

M. Christine Boyer , Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning ( Cambridge, MA , 1983), 69.

87.

Smith's disillusionment led to an important early inquiry into the ethics of client-based science and expert witnessing. See A. Gibson , “ Robert Angus Smith and Sanitary Science ” (master's thesis, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology , 1972 ), 1.33-1.37 ; and Christopher Hamlin “ Scientific Method and Expert Witnessing: Victorian Perspectives on a Modern Problem ,” Social Studies in Science 16 (1986): 485-513 .

88.

On public interest science, see Joel Primack and Frank von Hippel , Advise and Dissent ( New York , 1974); and Magali Sarfatti Larson , “ The Production of Expertise and the Constitution of Expert Power ,” in Thomas L. Haskell, ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory ( Bloomington , 1984), 66-68 ; and Stephen Turner , “ What Is the Problem With Experts ?” Social Studies of Science 31 (2001): 123-49 . Particularly on the kinds of issues considered here, see Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner , The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Waste before EPA ( Austin , 1996).

The City as a Chemical System? The Chemist as Urban Environmental Professional in France and Britain,1780—1880

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