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  • The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Abridged Edition
  • Jacob Steere-Williams
Martin V. Melosi. The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, Abridged Edition. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. 354 pp. $27.95 (paper).

The original publishing of Martin Melosi's The Sanitary City in 2000 marked, as Joel Tarr noted in an early review of the book, "the culmination of Martin Melosi's years of pioneering scholarship on urban infrastructure and the urban environment" (Joel Tarr, review of Melosi, The Sanitary City, in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.2 [Summer 2002]: 391–93). Looking back, The Sanitary City also reflected a growing trend by environmental historians to integrate narratives of urban space, urban landscape, and health. If environmental history was led in the 1990s by integrative and groundbreaking works such as William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis (1991) and Robert Gottlieb's Forcing the Spring (1993), Melosi's 2000 Sanitary City was to lead the direction of research into the next decade.

The original 2000 edition remains a historical tour de force in American environmental history. Organized by three main chronological time periods, "The Age of Miasmas: From Colonial Times to 1880," "The Bacteriological Revolution, 1880 to 1945," and "The New Ecology, 1945 to 2000s," Melosi argues that the decisions made by American engineers, public health officials, and politicians about the design of urban infrastructure were driven by changing paradigms of disease causation and theories of the environment. Focusing on three of the most important areas of urban technological development in the modern period, water supply, sewerage, and solid waste disposal, the book was masterfully researched, richly analyzed, and graphically reinforced with useful images and tables. But, aside from its historiographical influence, at around 600 pages The Sanitary City was admittedly cumbersome to use in undergraduate courses. [End Page 258]

Melosi's remedy is a new abridged edition with the University of Pittsburgh Press. The task, no doubt, was a difficult one, particularly since Melosi opted to keep the structural integrity of the book intact. All twenty chapters remain, albeit each in a scaled-down form. So too remain are copious examples from cities across the country, reflecting the archival strength of the original work. Many of the more specific topics of the abridged edition will greatly contribute to undergraduate courses. Debates about combined or separate sewer systems, or whether cities should filter water or treat sewage from the 1880s, for example, reflect the late nineteenth-century tension between a social and political faith in urban technocracy and continued scientific debates and conflicts over technological design and public health practice. Moreover, the strength of Melosi's The Sanitary City is to illustrate many of the most important themes in urban history, environmental history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine from the nineteenth century. The role of scientific expertise, the nature of professional ethics, political economy, federal, state, and local jurisdiction, and control of natural resources all loom large here.

Although chronologically arranged from colonial times to the present, an admittedly large scope, the heart of the book is the century from 1850 to 1950, when urban landscapes changed most dramatically in the modern period. So too did urban sanitary infrastructure, scientific theories of disease causation, and environmental and ecological understandings of the built and natural landscape.

Melosi reminds the reader that while the American urban sanitary landscape was often influenced by European trends, from Chadwick's nineteenth-century "sanitary idea" to the early twentieth-century solid refuse method of the sanitary landfill, the development of urban infrastructure in water supply, sewerage, and solid refuse disposal were uniquely American. Of particular importance were innovators such as the engineers and sanitary scientists at the Lawrence Experimental Station in Massachusetts. In addition, Melosi demonstrates that urban sanitary problems remained local, either city-based or state-based, until new ecological theories in the 1930s began to make clear that the pollution of air, land, and water were also of national importance. For most of the twentieth century, Melosi argues, an unstable political climate conducive to tackling sanitary reform on a national...

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