Sulphuric Utopias

Sulphuric Utopias is a rich and multidimensional history of technological efforts to control diseases of commerce during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cowritten by a historian of medicine and a medical anthropologist, the book examines how fumigation machines—particularly the Clayton machine—emerged as technological magic bullets that promised to end costly and unpopular quarantine regimes. Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris argue that these fumigation technologies sprang from and shaped utopian visions of frictionless global trade freed from the public health threats of a world connected by commerce. These visions emerged at a moment of profound change in the global history of science, technology, and medicine, but this is not a story of enlightened understandings leading in straightforward ways to efficacious technological solutions. Instead, it is a conceptually and theoretically sophisticated case study in the emergence, spread, stabilization, and disassembly of a sociotechnical approach to solving a historically shifting set of public health problems. While there is limited agricultural history content here, readers interested in science and technology studies, the history of medicine and public health, and the globalization of commerce will find much of interest.Fumigation was a venerable approach to sanitation, mostly aimed at counteracting bad odors and noxious effluvia, but maritime fumigation was a product of the bacteriological revolution. Miasmatic understandings of fumigation's efficacy began to give way to bacteriological ones in New Orleans, where, in the 1880s, Thomas Andrew Clayton, a Scottish immigrant and former cotton farmer, developed a fumigation device to treat supposedly infected ships and their goods. The main problem was yellow fever, which regularly visited the city in the nineteenth century and necessitated a strict quarantine regime that hampered trade. Those who believed yellow fever to be contagious saw soiled clothing or trade goods as carrying the “fomites” that spread the disease. Clayton's machine, patented in 1893, pumped sulfur gases into ship holds with the aim of killing those germs and, hopefully, replacing quarantines with a quick technological fix. Ironically, and instructively, it was also a technique deployed before the modern understanding of yellow fever as a vector-borne disease; the fomites it targeted were phantoms, though fumigation may have incidentally controlled the mosquitoes that spread the disease. Here we see the first hint of a major transformation charted by Sulphuric Utopias: fumigation, reinvented in the bacteriological age as a means of disinfection, would shift its focus to disinfestation.The Clayton machine, and the “sulphuric utopia” it promised, soon spread from New Orleans to other port cities, though its shape shifted in the process. The authors examine efforts in Hamburg and Istanbul to control the spread of bubonic plague and cholera through fumigation, efforts that then combined with attempts to control shipboard rats. Indeed, fumigation with sulfur dioxide offered rat control as a by-product, and when rats and their fleas were discovered to be carriers of plague, fumigation shifted its goal from disinfection to “deratinization.” The Clayton machine and similar contraptions—such as the Aparato Marot in France—spread among other European nations such as Britain and France, often as a means for “keeping apart the imagined modern salubrity of the West from the epidemic constituency of the rest of the world” (15). The authors then examine fumigation in Latin American public health campaigns through a case study of Argentina and the “Sulfurozador,” a variation on the Clayton machine. Fumigation was critical to Latin American sanitary modernity, so much so that the Argentines brought these fumigation machines from the harbor, where they had only treated ships, to the city streets, where revived sanitary brigades in Buenos Aires and other Latin American cities fought rats and the plague.From New Orleans and Europe's port cities to the Ottoman Empire and Latin America, and from the 1880s through World War I, these new fumigation technologies came to symbolize a type of modern environmental control that promised, as the authors put it, “to fortify and encourage the belief in a continuous flow of trade without the risk of disease transmission” (199). What held these visions together for several decades was a sense that sulfur functioned both to disinfect and to disinfest. But as the efficacy of sulfur's disinfecting qualities came under greater scrutiny, and as disinfestation became the primary goal of fumigation, other compounds such as cyanide replaced sulfur, which had the disadvantages of being flammable and leaving behind a long-lasting stench. By the interwar years, the utopianism of sulfur fumigation had faded.In the skillful hands of Engelmann and Lynteris, maritime fumigation becomes a central story in the global rise of modern public health regimes, one that has as much to do with technological imaginaries of modernity as it does with materially controlling disease and improving public health. These new technologies and engineering approaches emerged in response to a revolution in the scientific understanding of disease, but, over four decades, they also continually reshaped those understandings and the various public health responses to them

Apothecaries' system · Biology · Economic history · Fumigation · Globalization · Political science · Sanitation · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Ecology · Engineering · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law