The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age

300 p. From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Dustjacket slightly stained. Otherwise good and clean. - Schutzumschlag leicht fleckig, sonst gut und sauber. - Introduction: The preoccupation with water is, according to Jean-Pierre Goubert, one of the subdivisions of the religion of progress. This particular creed has its priests (doctors, architects, engineers), its temples and altars (aqueducts, baths. . .) and its congregations. An early document on the subject appears in the ‘medical topographies’ of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is a distant harbinger of our present ecology. The topographies had their origin in enquiries carried out in the eighteenth century by the Royal Society of Medicine. One of these enquiries was carried out by a Dr Berthelet who, in Lyons in 1783, denounced the bad drainage; he wanted to drive away miasmas and increase the number of fountains. These were the concerns of the old- fashioned ‘meteorological’ school of medicine which saw air and water as carriers of disease. This school also claimed, rightly or wrongly, to be geological; one doctor in Thiers spoke of the silt-laden water, while in Rennes in 1789 Salmon described the water as sulphorous and hard. These doctors were interested of course in the way in which water was drawn off, by porters, through wells and fountains, etc. The doctors of the time developed the notion of a link between a particular concept of water technology, in this case wells, and various diseases (congestion, obstructions of the viscera and the lower abdomen, swelling of the hypochondrium, cachectic diseases from which young nuns perished, etc.). The work of Daniel Roche is useful on this point; in 1787, the Academy of Sciences, which was granted a charter by the King, issued advice on the need to install drains and sewers in hospitals; the members of the academy were thus fulfilling the role left vacant, though not for long, by professionals and administrators. It is true that there was no question, as the ancien régime was drawing to a close, of installing a private water supply, toilet and bathroom in every dwelling. As early as the end of the eighteenth century, however, the solutions that were universally adopted in the nineteenth century were being put forward.Large cities such as Paris were to have pumping centres, or at least water would be supplied to the capital by gravity, as indeed it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a result of the diversion of the river Ourcq.Water retained its sacred, purifying role for a long time, whether this was reflected in the mineral springs honoured even in protohistorical times by ex-votos which had nothing Christian about them (and for a good reason), or quite simply in the holy water at the entrance to our churches. Was it really Lavoisier who, in the eighteenth century, gave a decisive push to the secularization and demystification of water by analysing it and showing that it could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, thus disproving the notion that it was an element like air, earth and fire. . .? In any case, mystery gave way to science, religion to technology and salvation to health.In discussing the social uses of water, Jean-Pierre Goubert makes the necessary distinction between town and country. The prefect of a department in central France was not concerned by the fact that peasants were drinking water that might be stagnant; on the other hand, he found it quite normal that in 1771 the city authorities in Bourg had built fountains and drained the ditches that were a breeding ground for malaria. The enormous problems created by the danger of malaria should be mentioned in this respect: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, many areas of stagnant water, such as the Dombes and the ponds of the Languedoc, were so badly affected by the disease that the peasant population was seriously debilitated. After the medical topographies a new source of information emerged during the First Empire; these were the papers of the Consultative Committee on Arts and Manufactures attached to the Ministry of the Interior, which was to continue its work during the Restoration. For example, the Committee expressed its opinion in 1826 on the proposals of an individual who wanted to use powdered coal as a protection against the putrefaction of water in the holds of ships. ISBN 9780691085449