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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.4 (2001) 613-614



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Book Review

Dust, A History of the Small and Invisible


Dust, A History of the Small and Invisible. By Joseph A. Amato (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000) 250 pp. $22.50

I finished reading Amato's well-crafted history of small and invisible particles while sitting in my alergist's office, awaiting my monthly injections. It seemed appropriate. After all, was I not there to acquire immunity against dust, pollen molds, and other microscopic irritants that make my eyes itch, my nose run, and my head ache? Amato is right, I thought. The small can wield disproportionate power over our lives, sometimes for better, but often for worse.

Amato offers a sparkling synthetic study--even a "poetic meditation," as the book jacket boasts--about humanity's changing relationship to the small, especially to dust, once "the finest thing the human eye could see" and, therefore, "the first and most common measure of smallness" (3). Prior to embarking on a chronological exploration of humankind's shifting perception of dust as reality and metaphor, the author observes that a history of dust must engage three paradoxes. One paradox is that industrialization, which generated so much dust and in such variety, also offered society the capacity to regulate dust with greater precision than in any earlier era. Second, even as society was learning the necessity of cleaning up dust, removing it from sight and the body, human discoverers in several fields of specialization were discovering entities--some living and some inert--even smaller than dust. Finally, despite the identification and mastery of much of the world that exists on a microscope slide, human beings are still fearful that their progress and abundance can be threatened, even undermined, by things only visible with powerful electron microscopes, and perhaps not even then. With the skill of a craftsman at the loom, Amato weaves these paradoxes into his text's fabric.

Amato begins with medieval European peasantry because, as he sees it, the essence of the peasant's inferiority was "their proximity to dust and dirt." Humanity, "mired in muck," took centuries to improve its condition. While some in the seventeenth and eighteenth century skillfully ground lenses to see small things, even tinier ones remained secluded from sight. Instruments remained imprecise, knowledge partial, and light too dim to probe the microscopic fully. Dust still reigned. With industrialization and the rise of the urban middle class, the microcosm became increasingly knowable. Dust impeded efficiency and promoted ill health. A "great cleanup" began. Water, light, and a host of new fabrics and other innovative materials were the weaponry used to banish dust. The environment was cleaner and more healthful by century's end.

The trend continued after 1900. At altars, worshippers still acknowl- edged that humanity began and ended as dust, while in laboratories, bacteria and viruses inspired fresh awe of the microcosm. After World War II, "Medicine cabinets became shrines where curing powders, sprays, and liquids accumulated. The pill, a tablet of fine dust, was contemporary [End Page 613] medicine's Communion wafer"(122). By century's end, the computer chip, the microwave, the gene, and the retro virus all became part of a microcosm that could be bent to human will only with new measurements and instruments. Amato speculates that we fail to succumb to fears of tiny viruses and weapons fueled by equally tiny atoms only because we measure all things against the scale of our own bodies and may be unable to sustain belief that unseen entities can uncontrollably "intrude on bodily experiences, personal fate, or everlasting destiny"(177).

Amato harvests an impressive array of others' monographs on dust, dirt, microbes, and society's efforts to deal with them. Specialists may have heard these issues raised with greater precision elsewhere, but non-specialists will find Amato's musings engaging.



Alan M. Kraut
American University

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