Edwin Chadwick and the Engineers, 1842—1854: Systems and Antisystems in the Pipe-and-Brick Sewers War

To the English sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick, author of the famous Report of an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), goes credit for recognizing the central importance of public works-waterworks, sewers, betterventilated streets and houses-to public health. Chadwick's career as a public health official lasted only from 1848 to 1854, yet his influence was great. In a broad sense, the administrative structures, the sanitary sensibilities, and the technologies (e.g., indoor running water and water closets) he developed or endorsed were adopted, and on great scale: by 1905, local authority debt in England and Wales for waterworks and sewers was nearly one hundred million pounds.' One might think engineers would have aligned themselves with Chadwick's programs-he brought them business. In fact, however, Chadwick's relations with engineers were wretched. For Chadwick, mid-century British civil engineers were part of the problems, not the solutions. He saw them as both loyal to a primitive laissez-faire and in cahoots with the most corrupt and irrational institutions of local government: the ancient municipal corporations, sewers commissions, and navigation trusts. He represented their works as hyperexpensive, uninformed by science, even dangerous. Worse, they clung to obsolete doctrines and rejected truths from outsiders. Historians, even those critical of Chadwick, have shared this view. They have seen