WHAT BECOMES OF POLLUTION? ADVERSARY SCIENCE AND THE CONTROVERSY ON THE SELF-PURIFICATION OF RIVERS IN BRITAIN, 1850-1900

Whether polluted streams underwent natural purification was a legal and political issue of enormous importance in nineteenth-century Britain. Polluters and the sellers of polluted water upheld self-purification; a coalition of anglers, landowners, and sanitarians denied it. Both sides hired scientists to prove either the inevitability or the impossibility of self-purification. The dissertation focuses on the development of ideas about water quality within this context.;I first examine social aspects: sanitary, legal, and political circumstances of pollution; employment of scientists in water-and-sewage issues; and relations among scientists that resulted from their participation in pollution litigation. Next, I consider the concepts of mid-nineteenth century water-and-sewage science: explanations of organic decomposition, of the filth-disease relationship; strategies for water analysis and water-and-sewage purification. Finally, I consider the changing nature of self-purification debate between 1850 and 1900. In the 1850s self-purification was a biological issue, aquatic organisms being regarded as indicators of purity and the chief mechanism of purification. In the 1870s chemistry replaced biology, a result of the improvement of chemical water analysis and the redefinition of pollution. Biology returned in the 1880s and 1890s owing to the recognition of two legitimate forms of self-purification: the destruction of disease germs, in part by aquatic predators, and the decomposition of refuse organic matter by aquatic saprophytes.;The chief theme of the dissertation is the relationship between the content and the social context of Victorian self-purification science. Scientific concepts, such as the notion that disease-causing materials purify rapidly, had political implications. Employment of scientists as providers of scientific justification for alternative river-use policies led to the evaluation of scientific concepts on a political rather than a scientific basis. Scientists' awareness that self-purification studies were inherently political undermined a key assumption required if scientists were to function as a community: that scientific works be assumed honest attempts to understand nature. Moreover, by valuing conclusions more highly than mechanisms, that context discouraged careful study of the process of self-purification.