Waste, wealth and public health: Recycling human excrement in the New England and mid-Atlantic states, 1820--1900.

摘要

An inquiry into the history of recycling human excrement, this dissertation explores the technological, social, political, economic and geographic aspects of the question. The study finds that many nineteenth-century Americans perceived recycling human excrement as a viable way to prevent environmental problems, it was a common practice in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states from 1820 to 1900, and a variety of recycling technologies were used which operated successfully in specific contexts. However, the construction of water-carriage sewers, the advent of the germ theory, political conflicts, the availability of commercial fertilizers, and the development of the global economy led to the decline of recycling.; Chapter One shows that the strongest advocates of recycling human excrement were agricultural public health reformers, who viewed it as a good way to solve the problems of soil exhaustion and excremental pollution. Chapter Two argues that agricultural reformers thought human excrement was a valuable fertilizer and that creating a complete cycle by returning human excrement to the soil was necessary in order to achieve permanent soil fertility.; In Chapter Three, this study claims that the rural privy/compost system was implemented voluntarily by many farmers because it integrated easily with their existing systems of manure management. Chapter Four looks at market gardening and poudrette production as systems that were designed to recycle urban excrement and argues that night soil fertilizers were popular among farmers. Chapter Five examines recycling as a public health issue in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Boston. Public health reformers in those cities promoted recycling because they believed it would prevent pollution, nuisances and disease. However, political conflicts often undermined their efforts to institute and improve recycling systems.; Chapter six analyzes the earth closet and the pneumatic system, two new recycling technologies that promised to make recycling more efficient while keeping excrement separate from greywater, storm water and industrial waste. Chapter seven focuses on broad irrigation, sub-surface irrigation, intermittent filtration and chemical precipitation, four technologies designed to recycle excrement mixed with wastewater. They were used in the eastern states to recycle the sewage of small towns, institutions, individual homes and factories.