Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments (review)

This informative and largely engaging collection of essays dives right into the thick of it—literally—describing a dense haze of unknown but largely anthropogenic composition blanketing much of southern Asia. This "Asian Brown Cloud," identified in 2002 by the United Nations Environmental Program, is used to introduce the book's central themes of scale, uncertainty, and materiality. The editors then make a claim for their book almost as large as the cloud itself: "By exploring the implications of recent phenomena such as the Asian Brown Cloud, this Osiris volume announces a fundamental revision in the way we understand the history of environment and health" (p. 2). Scholars of environmental or medical history, and especially those laboring at the intersection of those fields (many of whose works are referenced throughout these chapters), might disagree as to how fundamentally the field is revised here; still, it is good to have this interdisciplinary collection by some of the best and brightest scholars working at this crossroad. Considerably more than the conference proceedings that its form and origins suggest, considerably less than the foundational document that it claims to be, Landscapes of Exposure deserves to be widely read by scholars and students.

The book grew out of a 2002 workshop at the University of Wisconsin entitled "Environment and Health in Global Perspective." The editors have divided the volume into four sections in a valiant attempt to lump the sixteen chapters coherently—but the chapters' expansive and overlapping themes resist any neat containment. The first section, "Ecology and Infection," groups chapters by Helen Tilley, Warwick Anderson, and Nicholas B. King that together offer a multifocal study of the emergence of holism in twentieth-century biomedical sciences. The age of the microbe hunters and their search for single causes subject to specific therapies might have seemed, Anderson muses, "an arid waste of reductionism" (p. 41); on the contrary, these scholars find that throughout much of the twentieth century a number of highly influential scientists worked from a more Galenic view toward environmental factors in health. Quite in keeping with the theme of holism, their careers are presented not in terms of a chain of "begats," but as a shifting network developing organically—from British researchers studying sleeping sickness in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, to Theobald Smith, René Dubos, and others studying the interactions of living creatures in a complex environment.

The next section, "Economy and Place," contains three striking chapters: Conevery Bolton Valencius tells the stories of people on the move in search of health in the nineteenth century; Gregg Mitman traces the history of Denver—a city built on the ironic juxtaposition of healthy climate and mining—as its health-resort industry adjusted to the shifting burdens of chronic respiratory disease; and Giovanna Di Chiro takes readers on a "toxic tour" of the U.S.-Mexican border where impoverished transnational workers and their allies fight governments and industries to ameliorate the unhealthful "nature" of environments in which they work and live. Despite obvious differences in methodology and approach, these three chapters produce a satisfactory triptych, a thought-provoking meditation on the interplay of geography, society, and health.

If the title of the third section, "Material Flows and Public Health," sounds a bit jargony, the "flows" is certainly apt: in Susan D. Jones's chapter, milk from tubercular cows flows through food-industry channels from farm to fridge; Harold Platt describes attempts in two Progressive Era cities to deal with the flood of germs flowing through their water supplies; Scott Kirsch deals with fallout-borne radioiodine flowing over the American landscape; and Christopher Sellers studies two nations' relationship to fluoride, whether flowing through kitchen taps or bubbling up from natural or polluted groundwater sources. Three of these chapters employ transnational comparisons, which Jones argues can "demonstrate the generalizability of . . . factors...