Book Review

Canada and the United States

In this large, well-documented study, Martin V. Melosi lays out the evolution of three sanitary (environmental) services—water supply, sewerage, and solid-waste disposal—in the United States over the past 400 (mostly the last 160 years. These services are discussed through three eras: The Age of Miasmas to 1880, The Bacteriological Revolution 1880 to 1945, and The New Ecology 1945 to 2000.	1
Edwin Chadwick's 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain was the great watershed of the first era not only for Britain but for the United States and other industrializing countries as well. Prior to 1842, public health advocates had become increasingly certain that environmental conditions were responsible for outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, and influenza, especially among the urban poor whose numbers grew rapidly in the early ninteenth century as housing districts grew around new factories. Filth and in particular impure water were the chief culprits. In the 1840s, Chadwick and others, such as John Griscom in New York, raised consciousness to a higher pitch. They appealed to civic pride in persuading local politicians to hire more municipal employees to dispose of filth and to build public infrastructures, notably waterworks and, if more slowly, sewerage systems. States gradually established departments of public health.	2
With the discovery of bacteria, "germs," as the root cause of water-borne diseases, progress was much faster. By 1910 or so, all large cities and many smaller ones had installed filtration systems and the chlorination of water, thanks in large measure to the innovative ideas of civil engineers such as George Waring and Rudolph Hering. Typhoid epidemics virtually disappeared, though underserviced poor districts persisted in many U.S. cities. To protect their water supplies and beaches from pollution, many cities installed sewage treatment plants, although others continued to rely on downstream dilution of waste water rather than treatment.	. . .