The Blog

2020-

2020-12-13 c
WHEN "SCIENCE" GETS IT WRONG III
"Although the Board of Health was conceived of as a government body to lead the effort to improve and regulate sanitary conditions in accordance with scientific expertise, it quickly became an entrenched political interest devoted to the perpetuation of its own power and expansion of its own budget."

Herbert Spencer’s Critique of the Board of Health in 1851

n the 19th century, outbreaks of Cholera were common, and Britain deployed a “Board of Health” to manage and suppress the disease. England experienced a particularly severe wave of outbreaks in 1848 and 1849, with recurring instances over the next decade and a half.

The Board of Health in London adopted the consensus belief that Cholera spread by miasmic properties, which is to say “bad air” that supposedly caused the disease to linger in the vicinity of sewage, garbage, and similar sanitary problems. Address these concerns and the disease would vanish, or so the logic followed. The Board of Health accordingly hired and deployed teams of sanitary inspectors around the city to oversee and regulate the improvement of sewage systems that would carry the perceived source of Cholera away.

Although the Board of Health was conceived of as a government body to lead the effort to improve and regulate sanitary conditions in accordance with scientific expertise, it quickly became an entrenched political interest devoted to the perpetuation of its own power and expansion of its own budget.

The 19th century liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer included a devastating critique of the Board of Health in his 1851 book Social Statics, which argued that the bureaucratic properties of the agency had led it astray from its mission and even created an impediment to public health (David Hart provides a lengthy discussion of Spencer’s writings on sanitation here).

Instead of taking immediate mitigation measures to prepare for an epidemic that had already stricken continental Europe, the Board devoted its energies to long-term engineering projects to improve the city’s sewer system. Some of these projects would eventually yield sanitary benefits. But they also provided lucrative money-making opportunities for politically connected contractors, and – due to the prevailing miasma theory – they largely misdiagnosed the causes of Cholera. Although the sewer improvements removed stagnant sources of waste and refuse, they also deposited them in the Thames – the major source of drinking water for the city.

... Rather than improve public health, the government had only distorted and politicized the necessary scientific processes. (read more)

2020-12-13 b
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