| The United States Supreme Court Case, State of Missouri v. State of Illinois and the Sanitary District of Chicago, (1900-1906) provides an instructive case study of how the participation of scientists in legal struggles helped shape the direction of both municipal public health campaigns and scientific work. In assessing whether Chicago's Sanitary and Ship Canal posed a typhoid threat to the citizens of St. Louis downstream, scientists from local universities and health departments conducted extensive chemical and bacteriological studies of the Illinois and Mississippi River systems. The scientific community used this legal battle to its own advantage, to conduct funded studies of the typhoid bacillus in "natural conditions," to test standard methods of water analysis, and to define their role in public health work.;My dissertation first explores the role engineers, chemists, and bacteriologists played in public health work, focusing on typhoid fever prevention in Chicago from 1850 through the Supreme Court's decision in favor of Chicago in 1906. These anti-typhoid campaigns in Chicago reveal that typhoid prevention did not become the province of any one scientific discipline but remained an interdisciplinary endeavor into the twentieth century. Second, the dissertation examines how public health work offered an important forum for creative scientific research. At a time period in which the German ethic of pure research had crossed the Atlantic but few funded research opportunities existed in the United States, American scientists undertook public health research, often forcefully denying the existence, necessity or relevance of a dichotomy between pure and applied science. Finally, the dissertation uses the debates within the scientific community surrounding the nature of expert witnessing to investigate scientists' aspirations to present themselves as models of Progressive Era efficiency: honest, reliable men (and women) who produced rational, accurate, and useful data for society at a minimum cost. |
