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Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000
ENDE-586; No. of Pages 3
Introduction to the Special Issue
Endeavour
Full text provided by www.sciencedirect.com
Vol. xxx No. x
ScienceDirect
Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000 Ximo Guillem-Llobat and Jose´ Ramo´n Bertomeu Sa´nchez Institute for the History of Medicine and Science ‘‘Lo´pez Pin˜ero’’ (University of Valencia), Spain
This special issue showcases papers presented at 8th European Spring School on the History of Science and Popularization, organized by the Catalan Society for the History of Science and Technology. Held in Mao´ (Menorca) in May 2015, the conference ‘‘Living in a Toxic World 1800–2000’’ highlighted current scholarship on toxic products and their effects on human health. These studies were inspired in part by the growing social concern over the thousands of new products deposited every year into the atmosphere, rivers, sea, ground, our food, and our bodies. During the last two centuries, this range of substances has included minerals (compounds of mercury, lead, aluminum, arsenic, and so forth.) substances synthesized or isolated in laboratories (pharmaceuticals, plastics, and pesticides) and other organic products (such as polychlorobiphenyls, polyvinyl chloride, bisphenol-A, just to name a few). These substances have been employed as medical therapies and food additives, war weapons, and farming fertilizers, or even as everyday commodities. In the last decades, motivated by the aforementioned concerns, scholars have analyzed how groups involved in the production and regulation of toxic products, as well as citizens exposed to them, have shaped public awareness of both their beneficial and pernicious qualities. A review of recent trends on these topics can be found in edited volumes such as Massard-Guilbaud and Mosley (2011)19; Le Roux and Lette´ (2013),27 Boudia and Jas (2013),4 Boudia and Jas (2014)5; Davis (2014)2; and Rodger and Johnson (2014),24 and the essay by Jas (2014).13 Ulrich Beck’s seminal work Risikogesellschaft (1986)3 is the foundation for recent research into risk assessment, in particular with respect to pollutants and toxic chemicals. Recent studies have demonstrated the long roots of ‘‘risk society’’ prior to the twentieth-century (Fresoz, 2012,10 Le Roux, 201126). In tune with these studies, the expression ‘‘industrial-hazard regimes’’ has highlighted the social and cultural contingencies related to risk management (Melling & Sellers, 201228). Other authors have examined the role of industry in producing knowledge and ignorance about toxins, in some cases promoting counterfeited controversies on the causal connections between toxic products and health problems (Markowitz & Rosner, 200217). In many cases, the industry has fanned the flames of ignorance and uncertainty on sensitive topics (Proctor & Schiebinger, 200822), sometimes with the support of ‘‘merchants of doubt,’’ including academic experts, journalists, think tanks, and political groups (Oreskes & Conway, 201021). Historians of medicine and law have analyzed how different legal systems confronted these practices, and have also reviewed the difficulties of protecting the public from industrial and criminal poisons (Cranor, 20068; Golan, 200411; Watson, 201131) (Fig. 1). Many studies have focused on particular products and their regulation, for example, lead (Markowitz & Rosner, 201318), arsenic (Whorton, 201032; Arnold, 20161) tobacco (Proctor, www.sciencedirect.com
201123), DDT (Kinkela, 201115), radioisotopes (Creager, 20139), hormone disruptors (Langston, 201016), or fumes (Mosley, 200820; Uekoetter, 200930, Le Roux, 201126). These studies have used different disciplinary perspectives and a broad spectrum of research and political interests. As Sellers and Melling (2012)28 remarked in the introduction to their edited collection, historical studies on toxic products have become a ‘‘contact zone’’ where historians of science, technology, medicine, and the environment have met with social scientists as well as with contemporary practitioners and activists. These studies have developed into a fascinating and ever-changing landscape that was explored by the participants of the spring school organized in Mao´ during May 2015. The conference concentrated on the regulation of toxics from the perspectives of different actors, in different places, over the last two centuries. The five papers in this volume offer a taste of the questions raised at the Mao´ school. The first paper by Thomas Le Roux reconstructs the ‘‘great shift’’ in industrial hazards which took place at the turn of the eighteenth century. He notes how in France, traditional regulations became outdated with the expansion of the industry that began in the decades before the French Revolution. He examines the new industrial rules created by a selected group of members of the Paris Academy of Science: chemists who wrote several expert reports at the request of the political authorities. Le Roux argues that after several decades of controversies, a new legal framework emerged that demanded high standards of proof for evaluating the risks produced by polluting industries, which ultimately favored businesses and concealed health hazards. Le Roux notes how these new standards of proof were at times insurmountable, making it impossible to undertake legal actions against polluters. Comparing Britain and France, Le Roux elucidates the similarities and differences between these two legal systems. Using the debate over smokeless furnaces as a case study, he perceives that French and
Fig. 1. Author: Idoia Calabuig (2010).
0160-9327/ß 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.03.008
Please cite this article in press as: Guillem-Llobat, X. and Bertomeu Sa´nchez, J.R., Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000, Endeavour (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.03.008
ENDE-586; No. of Pages 3
Introduction to the Special Issue
2
Endeavour Vol. xxx No. x
British authorities addressed the problems of pollution in similar ways, despite striking differences in governmental practices and regulations. In many cases in the nineteenth century, both nations encouraged the introduction of technical improvements to address existing problems and so neglected the preventive approaches customary in the previous century. The new French laws promulgated between the 1810s and the early 1820s brought polluting industries under administrative control of the state, whereas no regulatory agency existed in Britain until the middle of the nineteenth century. The author notes how different regulations also involved various agents playing diverse roles on either side of the English Channel: experts (particularly, chemists and engineers), health committees, insurance companies, policy makers, and other stakeholders. Jose´ Ramo´n Bertomeu-Sa´nchez’s paper on ‘‘normal arsenic’’ (i.e., the existence of traces of arsenic in healthy human bodies) also focuses on nineteenth-century France. BertomeuSanchez tracks the debate on ‘‘normal arsenic’’ throughout medical, legal, and scientific arenas uncovering different perceptions associated with toxic products and their local and contingent agency. In the nineteenth-century, ‘‘normal arsenic’’ was the subject of medical and scientific inquiry in several disciplinary areas (such as toxicology, pharmacology, and biological chemistry). Arsenic appeared in everyday household products; it was not merely a potent poison. Arsenic is therefore a good ‘‘cultural tracer’’ that can be followed through its changing legal, medical, scientific, and popular perceptions. Tracking one toxin into different arenas undermines the narrative of technological progress, in which the arrival of highly sensitive methods for detection (the Marsh test for arsenic) is regarded as a milestone in the history of toxicology. The controversies on ‘‘normal arsenic’’ demonstrate how new scientific methods of detection also introduced puzzling problems and fostered intense debates in courts, academies, and bourgeois salons. The issue of ‘‘normal arsenic’’ resurfaced in scholarly literature in late nineteenth century thanks to Gabriel Bertrand’s research into the emerging area of biological chemistry and nutritional science. The topic was also mobilized in debates on criminal poisoning at the turn of the twentieth century. Gerald Markowitz focuses on lead poisoning in children in the twentieth-century United States. The problem has recently captured public attention thanks to major scandals such as polluted drinking water in Flint, Michigan (Rosner–Markowitz, 201625; Gross, 201612). Mastering a rather chaotic maze of internal memos and secret meeting minutes, Markowitz sheds lights on many widespread (but difficult to track) practices related to the twentieth-century chemical industry. He notes how industry advertising campaigns in magazines such as the ‘‘Dutch Boy Painter,’’ and books intended for children and families tried to counteract the growing medical literature on the dangers of lead paint. These well-funded campaigns exaggerated uncertainties in causal connections between lead paint and health problems, sometimes highlighting potential alternative causes that pointed away from lead paint. Even when medical evidence became extremely compelling, chemical industries created substitute arguments that impugned the victims directly or blamed their genetic, economic, or hygienic conditions. The industry continued to dispute the available medical evidence at the beginning of the new millennium in the
trials instigated by the victims’ families. Like in other cases, such as those that targeted the tobacco industry, these trials on lead poisoning give historians access to previously secret documents, which open the window to detailed critical analyses, such as this one by Markowitz. The different standards of proof and the role of experts are also important issues in the final two papers in this special issue. These papers show how different kind of experts evolved, challenged, or supplemented the typology established by Collins and Evans (2007).7 It so happens through the emergence of two basic types of experts from the narrative, such as: partisan experts, who were captured by the interests of their patrons (industry, state entities, politicians, etc.), as in Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt; and experience-based experts or activists-experts, who were connected with grassroots movements and affected communities. Authors dealing with the latter group have also introduced current debates on the divide between lay and expert communities and the pitfalls posed by ‘‘the received view’’ (or the ‘‘deficit model’’) of science communication. This is exemplified in the paper by Roberto Cantoni on the waste crisis in Campania, when he explains the reaction of Paolo d’Argenio, officer of the Minister of Health, to the publication of an expert report. Paolo d’Argenio lamented that expert reports had been misunderstood, and thus had generated alarm and mistrust among the population, encouraged by irresponsible science writers ‘‘flirting with maximalist left-wing associations.’’ There was in this sense a reference to ‘‘populace’s emotional distortion of facts’’ in contrast to experts’ rationality. Lay expertise was, nevertheless, highly valued by other participants in the controversy studied by Cantoni. That was the case of science communicator Cinzia Colombo, who disseminated activists’ scientific arguments, in line with the ‘‘popular epidemiology’’ described by Phil Brown (1992).6 Roberto Cantoni’s paper analyzes the waste crisis between 2001 and 2009 and complements previous studies dealing with the case by focusing on the production of knowledge and ignorance by experts. His work develops the framework established by Proctor and Schiebinger’s Agnotology, as well as by Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, among others, and pays special attention to the communication and the staging of risk. Other key elements of Cantoni’s analysis are the credibility of the journals and groups publishing the reports, the dramatic impact of rhetorical images such as the ‘‘triangle of death’’ (used in order to refer to the contaminated zone), as well as the strong narratives with which Government representatives opposed the uncertainties expressed by scientists. The perception and staging of risk is also discussed in Claas Kirchhelle’s paper on the regulation of the use of antibiotics in food production. The paper focuses on the German case in order to follow the evolution of the controversy in which these practices were involved, but it successfully fits the local case in the international context. The author highlights the specific German trends in regulating the use of antibiotics and link them to the development and impact of popular vernacular risk cultures, as a supplement to Jasanoff’s (2005)14 civic epistemologies or Schwerin’s (2009)29 risk epistemes. In order to deal with them, Kirchhelle relies on different sources to those used by the authors of the other papers in this special issue. He pays special attention to German weekly news magazines such as Die
www.sciencedirect.com Please cite this article in press as: Guillem-Llobat, X. and Bertomeu Sa´nchez, J.R., Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000, Endeavour (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.03.008
ENDE-586; No. of Pages 3
Introduction to the Special Issue
Endeavour
Zeit and Der Spiegel. And in his analysis he gives a special explanatory value to the framing of risk, specifically to the prevalence of public’s Chemie focus in Germany as opposed to the focus on the problem of bacterial resistance that developed in other countries. A book review essay by Rachel Rothschild, an expert on the history of acid rain, rounds out this special issue. Rothschild examines three recent histories which we have already cited: Rosner and Markowitz’s Lead Wars, Boudia and Jas’s Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World and Davis’s Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology. Rothschild praises these works as models for historical research on toxicity. More than that, however, she observes that historians can – and should – play essential roles in debates about environmental toxins and chemical pollutants, from engaging nonspecialist communities to providing expertise for legal or regulatory decisions. This point is well illustrated by a March 2016 episode of the National Public Radio program, Fresh Air. The host Terry Gross (2016)12 interviewed Rosner and Markowitz for a deeper perspective on lead poisoning in the wake of the water crisis in Flint. In her review, Rothschild does find one general deficiency in historical scholarship on toxicity: it tends to focus too exclusively on American case studies. This special issue’s multinational approach meets this concern. Finally, many of the papers included in this special issue announce the need for a more democratic decision-making process in which a broad range of experts, like those entrusted in assessing and managing toxic risks, could play a major role. This is the direction to which new studies on science and its publics has evolved recently, moving away from the ‘‘deficit model‘’ of public understanding of science that relied on a strict hierarchy between experts and lay people. Assuming that the borders between expert and lay people are fuzzy and somehow constructed by the historical actors, some new studies have offered diverse perspectives concerning hybrid forums and mediation, while others have highlighted the need for involving community groups, from the beginning, in the production of regulatory knowledge. In short, historical studies exemplified by the papers in this issue offer new data and perspectives for enriching current debates on the regulation of toxic products. References 1. Arnold D. Toxics Histories. Poison and Pollution in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2016. 2. Davis FR. Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 2014.
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3. Beck U. Risikogesellschaft auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; 1986. 4. Boudia S, Jas N, eds. Toxicants, Health and Regulation Since 1945. London: Pickering & Chatto; 2013. 5. Boudia S, Jas N, eds. Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World. London: Berghahn Books; 2014. 6. Brown P. Popular Epidemiology and Toxic Waste Concentration: Lay and Professional Ways of Knowing. J Health Soc Behav. 1992;33(3):267–281. 7. Collins H, Evans R. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: Chicago University Press; 2007. 8. Cranor C. Toxic Torts: Science, Law and the Possibility of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006. 9. Creager A. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine. Chicago: Chicago University Press; 2013. 10. Fresoz J-B. L’apocalypse joyeuse: Une histoire du risque technologique. Paris: Seuil; 2012. 11. Golan T. Laws of Man and Laws of Nature: A History of Scientific Expert Testimony. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2004. 12. Gross T. ’‘America’s ‘Lead Wars’ Go Beyond Flint, Mich.: ‘It’s Now Really Everywhere‘’ (an interview with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz on March 3). Fresh Air National Public Radio. 2016. At: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/ 03/03/469039064/ americas-lead-wars-go-beyond-flint-mich-its-now-really-everywhere. 13. Jas N. Essay review. Chemicals and environmental history. Ambix. 2014;61(2): 194–198. 14. Jasanoff S. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Woodstock: Princeton University Press; 2005. 15. Kinkela D. DDT and the American Century. Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide that Changed the World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; 2011. 16. Langston N. Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the legacy of DES. New Haven: Yale University Press; 2010. 17. Markowitz G, Rosner D. Deceit and Denial. The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. New York: University of California Press and Milbank Books; 2002. 18. Markowitz G, Rosner D. Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2013. 19. Massard-Guilbaud G, Mosley S, eds. Common Ground: Integrating the Social and Environmental in History. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 2011. 20. Mosley S. The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester. Cambridge: White Horse Press; 2008. 21. Oreskes N, Conway E. Merchants of Doubt. How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury; 2010. 22. Proctor RN, Schiebinger L, eds. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford: University Press; 2008. 23. Proctor RN. Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. Berkeley: University of California Press; 2011. 24. Rodger JF, Johnson A, eds. Toxic Airs. Body, Place. Planet in Historical Perspective. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press; 2014. 25. Rosner D, Markowitz G. Two, Three... Many Flints: America’s Coast-to-Coast Toxic Crisis. 2016. At: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176101/tomgram%3A_ rosner_and_markowitz,_welcome_to_the_united_states_of_flint. Accessed February 16. 26. Le Roux T. Le laboratoire des pollutions industrielles: Paris, 1770–1830. Paris: Albin Michel; 2011. 27. Le Roux T, Lette´ M, eds. De´bordements industriels: environnement, territoire et conflit (XVIIIe-XIXe sie`cle). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes; 2013. 28. Sellers C, Melling J, eds. Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; 2012. 29. Schwerin AV. Preka¨re Stoffe: Radiumo¨konomie, Risikoepisteme Und Die Etablierung Der Radioindikatortechnik in Der Zeit Des Nationalsozialismus. NTM Int J Hist Ethics Nat Sci Technol Med. (17):2009;(17):5–33. 30. Uekoetter F. The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press; 2009. 31. Watson K. Forensic Medicine in Western Society: A History. London: Routledge; 2011. 32. Whorton JC. The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play. Oxford: University Press; 2010.
www.sciencedirect.com Please cite this article in press as: Guillem-Llobat, X. and Bertomeu Sa´nchez, J.R., Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000, Endeavour (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.03.008
Introduction to the Special Issue
Endeavour
Full text provided by www.sciencedirect.com
Vol. xxx No. x
ScienceDirect
Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000 Ximo Guillem-Llobat and Jose´ Ramo´n Bertomeu Sa´nchez Institute for the History of Medicine and Science ‘‘Lo´pez Pin˜ero’’ (University of Valencia), Spain
This special issue showcases papers presented at 8th European Spring School on the History of Science and Popularization, organized by the Catalan Society for the History of Science and Technology. Held in Mao´ (Menorca) in May 2015, the conference ‘‘Living in a Toxic World 1800–2000’’ highlighted current scholarship on toxic products and their effects on human health. These studies were inspired in part by the growing social concern over the thousands of new products deposited every year into the atmosphere, rivers, sea, ground, our food, and our bodies. During the last two centuries, this range of substances has included minerals (compounds of mercury, lead, aluminum, arsenic, and so forth.) substances synthesized or isolated in laboratories (pharmaceuticals, plastics, and pesticides) and other organic products (such as polychlorobiphenyls, polyvinyl chloride, bisphenol-A, just to name a few). These substances have been employed as medical therapies and food additives, war weapons, and farming fertilizers, or even as everyday commodities. In the last decades, motivated by the aforementioned concerns, scholars have analyzed how groups involved in the production and regulation of toxic products, as well as citizens exposed to them, have shaped public awareness of both their beneficial and pernicious qualities. A review of recent trends on these topics can be found in edited volumes such as Massard-Guilbaud and Mosley (2011)19; Le Roux and Lette´ (2013),27 Boudia and Jas (2013),4 Boudia and Jas (2014)5; Davis (2014)2; and Rodger and Johnson (2014),24 and the essay by Jas (2014).13 Ulrich Beck’s seminal work Risikogesellschaft (1986)3 is the foundation for recent research into risk assessment, in particular with respect to pollutants and toxic chemicals. Recent studies have demonstrated the long roots of ‘‘risk society’’ prior to the twentieth-century (Fresoz, 2012,10 Le Roux, 201126). In tune with these studies, the expression ‘‘industrial-hazard regimes’’ has highlighted the social and cultural contingencies related to risk management (Melling & Sellers, 201228). Other authors have examined the role of industry in producing knowledge and ignorance about toxins, in some cases promoting counterfeited controversies on the causal connections between toxic products and health problems (Markowitz & Rosner, 200217). In many cases, the industry has fanned the flames of ignorance and uncertainty on sensitive topics (Proctor & Schiebinger, 200822), sometimes with the support of ‘‘merchants of doubt,’’ including academic experts, journalists, think tanks, and political groups (Oreskes & Conway, 201021). Historians of medicine and law have analyzed how different legal systems confronted these practices, and have also reviewed the difficulties of protecting the public from industrial and criminal poisons (Cranor, 20068; Golan, 200411; Watson, 201131) (Fig. 1). Many studies have focused on particular products and their regulation, for example, lead (Markowitz & Rosner, 201318), arsenic (Whorton, 201032; Arnold, 20161) tobacco (Proctor, www.sciencedirect.com
201123), DDT (Kinkela, 201115), radioisotopes (Creager, 20139), hormone disruptors (Langston, 201016), or fumes (Mosley, 200820; Uekoetter, 200930, Le Roux, 201126). These studies have used different disciplinary perspectives and a broad spectrum of research and political interests. As Sellers and Melling (2012)28 remarked in the introduction to their edited collection, historical studies on toxic products have become a ‘‘contact zone’’ where historians of science, technology, medicine, and the environment have met with social scientists as well as with contemporary practitioners and activists. These studies have developed into a fascinating and ever-changing landscape that was explored by the participants of the spring school organized in Mao´ during May 2015. The conference concentrated on the regulation of toxics from the perspectives of different actors, in different places, over the last two centuries. The five papers in this volume offer a taste of the questions raised at the Mao´ school. The first paper by Thomas Le Roux reconstructs the ‘‘great shift’’ in industrial hazards which took place at the turn of the eighteenth century. He notes how in France, traditional regulations became outdated with the expansion of the industry that began in the decades before the French Revolution. He examines the new industrial rules created by a selected group of members of the Paris Academy of Science: chemists who wrote several expert reports at the request of the political authorities. Le Roux argues that after several decades of controversies, a new legal framework emerged that demanded high standards of proof for evaluating the risks produced by polluting industries, which ultimately favored businesses and concealed health hazards. Le Roux notes how these new standards of proof were at times insurmountable, making it impossible to undertake legal actions against polluters. Comparing Britain and France, Le Roux elucidates the similarities and differences between these two legal systems. Using the debate over smokeless furnaces as a case study, he perceives that French and
Fig. 1. Author: Idoia Calabuig (2010).
0160-9327/ß 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.03.008
Please cite this article in press as: Guillem-Llobat, X. and Bertomeu Sa´nchez, J.R., Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000, Endeavour (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.03.008
ENDE-586; No. of Pages 3
Introduction to the Special Issue
2
Endeavour Vol. xxx No. x
British authorities addressed the problems of pollution in similar ways, despite striking differences in governmental practices and regulations. In many cases in the nineteenth century, both nations encouraged the introduction of technical improvements to address existing problems and so neglected the preventive approaches customary in the previous century. The new French laws promulgated between the 1810s and the early 1820s brought polluting industries under administrative control of the state, whereas no regulatory agency existed in Britain until the middle of the nineteenth century. The author notes how different regulations also involved various agents playing diverse roles on either side of the English Channel: experts (particularly, chemists and engineers), health committees, insurance companies, policy makers, and other stakeholders. Jose´ Ramo´n Bertomeu-Sa´nchez’s paper on ‘‘normal arsenic’’ (i.e., the existence of traces of arsenic in healthy human bodies) also focuses on nineteenth-century France. BertomeuSanchez tracks the debate on ‘‘normal arsenic’’ throughout medical, legal, and scientific arenas uncovering different perceptions associated with toxic products and their local and contingent agency. In the nineteenth-century, ‘‘normal arsenic’’ was the subject of medical and scientific inquiry in several disciplinary areas (such as toxicology, pharmacology, and biological chemistry). Arsenic appeared in everyday household products; it was not merely a potent poison. Arsenic is therefore a good ‘‘cultural tracer’’ that can be followed through its changing legal, medical, scientific, and popular perceptions. Tracking one toxin into different arenas undermines the narrative of technological progress, in which the arrival of highly sensitive methods for detection (the Marsh test for arsenic) is regarded as a milestone in the history of toxicology. The controversies on ‘‘normal arsenic’’ demonstrate how new scientific methods of detection also introduced puzzling problems and fostered intense debates in courts, academies, and bourgeois salons. The issue of ‘‘normal arsenic’’ resurfaced in scholarly literature in late nineteenth century thanks to Gabriel Bertrand’s research into the emerging area of biological chemistry and nutritional science. The topic was also mobilized in debates on criminal poisoning at the turn of the twentieth century. Gerald Markowitz focuses on lead poisoning in children in the twentieth-century United States. The problem has recently captured public attention thanks to major scandals such as polluted drinking water in Flint, Michigan (Rosner–Markowitz, 201625; Gross, 201612). Mastering a rather chaotic maze of internal memos and secret meeting minutes, Markowitz sheds lights on many widespread (but difficult to track) practices related to the twentieth-century chemical industry. He notes how industry advertising campaigns in magazines such as the ‘‘Dutch Boy Painter,’’ and books intended for children and families tried to counteract the growing medical literature on the dangers of lead paint. These well-funded campaigns exaggerated uncertainties in causal connections between lead paint and health problems, sometimes highlighting potential alternative causes that pointed away from lead paint. Even when medical evidence became extremely compelling, chemical industries created substitute arguments that impugned the victims directly or blamed their genetic, economic, or hygienic conditions. The industry continued to dispute the available medical evidence at the beginning of the new millennium in the
trials instigated by the victims’ families. Like in other cases, such as those that targeted the tobacco industry, these trials on lead poisoning give historians access to previously secret documents, which open the window to detailed critical analyses, such as this one by Markowitz. The different standards of proof and the role of experts are also important issues in the final two papers in this special issue. These papers show how different kind of experts evolved, challenged, or supplemented the typology established by Collins and Evans (2007).7 It so happens through the emergence of two basic types of experts from the narrative, such as: partisan experts, who were captured by the interests of their patrons (industry, state entities, politicians, etc.), as in Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt; and experience-based experts or activists-experts, who were connected with grassroots movements and affected communities. Authors dealing with the latter group have also introduced current debates on the divide between lay and expert communities and the pitfalls posed by ‘‘the received view’’ (or the ‘‘deficit model’’) of science communication. This is exemplified in the paper by Roberto Cantoni on the waste crisis in Campania, when he explains the reaction of Paolo d’Argenio, officer of the Minister of Health, to the publication of an expert report. Paolo d’Argenio lamented that expert reports had been misunderstood, and thus had generated alarm and mistrust among the population, encouraged by irresponsible science writers ‘‘flirting with maximalist left-wing associations.’’ There was in this sense a reference to ‘‘populace’s emotional distortion of facts’’ in contrast to experts’ rationality. Lay expertise was, nevertheless, highly valued by other participants in the controversy studied by Cantoni. That was the case of science communicator Cinzia Colombo, who disseminated activists’ scientific arguments, in line with the ‘‘popular epidemiology’’ described by Phil Brown (1992).6 Roberto Cantoni’s paper analyzes the waste crisis between 2001 and 2009 and complements previous studies dealing with the case by focusing on the production of knowledge and ignorance by experts. His work develops the framework established by Proctor and Schiebinger’s Agnotology, as well as by Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, among others, and pays special attention to the communication and the staging of risk. Other key elements of Cantoni’s analysis are the credibility of the journals and groups publishing the reports, the dramatic impact of rhetorical images such as the ‘‘triangle of death’’ (used in order to refer to the contaminated zone), as well as the strong narratives with which Government representatives opposed the uncertainties expressed by scientists. The perception and staging of risk is also discussed in Claas Kirchhelle’s paper on the regulation of the use of antibiotics in food production. The paper focuses on the German case in order to follow the evolution of the controversy in which these practices were involved, but it successfully fits the local case in the international context. The author highlights the specific German trends in regulating the use of antibiotics and link them to the development and impact of popular vernacular risk cultures, as a supplement to Jasanoff’s (2005)14 civic epistemologies or Schwerin’s (2009)29 risk epistemes. In order to deal with them, Kirchhelle relies on different sources to those used by the authors of the other papers in this special issue. He pays special attention to German weekly news magazines such as Die
www.sciencedirect.com Please cite this article in press as: Guillem-Llobat, X. and Bertomeu Sa´nchez, J.R., Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000, Endeavour (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.03.008
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Introduction to the Special Issue
Endeavour
Zeit and Der Spiegel. And in his analysis he gives a special explanatory value to the framing of risk, specifically to the prevalence of public’s Chemie focus in Germany as opposed to the focus on the problem of bacterial resistance that developed in other countries. A book review essay by Rachel Rothschild, an expert on the history of acid rain, rounds out this special issue. Rothschild examines three recent histories which we have already cited: Rosner and Markowitz’s Lead Wars, Boudia and Jas’s Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World and Davis’s Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology. Rothschild praises these works as models for historical research on toxicity. More than that, however, she observes that historians can – and should – play essential roles in debates about environmental toxins and chemical pollutants, from engaging nonspecialist communities to providing expertise for legal or regulatory decisions. This point is well illustrated by a March 2016 episode of the National Public Radio program, Fresh Air. The host Terry Gross (2016)12 interviewed Rosner and Markowitz for a deeper perspective on lead poisoning in the wake of the water crisis in Flint. In her review, Rothschild does find one general deficiency in historical scholarship on toxicity: it tends to focus too exclusively on American case studies. This special issue’s multinational approach meets this concern. Finally, many of the papers included in this special issue announce the need for a more democratic decision-making process in which a broad range of experts, like those entrusted in assessing and managing toxic risks, could play a major role. This is the direction to which new studies on science and its publics has evolved recently, moving away from the ‘‘deficit model‘’ of public understanding of science that relied on a strict hierarchy between experts and lay people. Assuming that the borders between expert and lay people are fuzzy and somehow constructed by the historical actors, some new studies have offered diverse perspectives concerning hybrid forums and mediation, while others have highlighted the need for involving community groups, from the beginning, in the production of regulatory knowledge. In short, historical studies exemplified by the papers in this issue offer new data and perspectives for enriching current debates on the regulation of toxic products. References 1. Arnold D. Toxics Histories. Poison and Pollution in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2016. 2. Davis FR. Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 2014.
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www.sciencedirect.com Please cite this article in press as: Guillem-Llobat, X. and Bertomeu Sa´nchez, J.R., Living in a Toxic World, 1800–2000, Endeavour (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2016.03.008