Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible [1 ed.] 0520231953, 9780520231955

Citation preview

A HI STORY

OP- TH F. S MALL

& TI1£,XN VISI B LE

DUST

Joseph A.

Amato

/hile the story of the big has often been "told.-the story of the small has not yet even been outlined.

With Dust, Joseph A. Amato

the reader with the

and the

invisible.

first

Dust

how dust has been

enthralls

history of the small

is a

poetic meditation

on

experienced and the small

has been imagined across the ages. Examining a

thousand years of Western civiHzation

— from

the naturalisrft of medieval philosophy, to the artistry

of the Renaissance, to the scientific and

industrial revolutions, to the

nanotechnology and

modern worlds of

viral diseases

Dust offers

a savvy story of the genesis of the microcosm.

the deepest recesses of space,

Dust, which

fills

pervades

earthly things.

ages

it

all

Throughout the

has been the smallest yet the most com-

mon element of everyday Hfe. Of all small things, dust has

the eye sees

been the most minute

particle

until

and the hand touches. Indeed,

this century, dust was simply accepted as a

fundamental condition of hfe; it

marked

like darkness,

the boundary between the seen

and

the unseen.

With the

full

advent of scientific discovery, tech-

nological innovation,

been

and

social control, dust

partitioned, dissected, manipulated,

has

and

even invented. In place of traditional and generic dust, a highly diverse particulate has

ered and examined. Like so

been discov-

much else that was

once considered minute, dust has been dwarfed by the twentieth-century transformations of our

It€S

DUST

UNIV E R SITY OF CAL IFORNIA PRESS

berkeh y

los

angeles

lon don

i

„A_.HlSXQJLY.^OJ,._TaE_SMALL,.AND.,T,HE.,.iN

Joseph A.

Amato

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

©

2000 by the Regents of the University of California

Illustrations

©

Abigail Rorer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Amato, Joseph Anthony. Dust

a history

:

of the small and the invisible / Joseph A. Araato.

cm.

p.

Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-520-21875-2 (alk. paper). I.

—

Dust

Social aspects

Philosophy.

I.

RA577.D8 A48 55i-5i'i3

10

07

History.

2.

Size perception.

dc2i

06

3.

Science

2000

—

Manufactured

08

—

Title.

99-27115

in the

05

United States of America

04

03

02

01

987654321

The paper used

in this publication

00

99

meets the

minimum

ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (r 1997) {Permanence of Paper).

requirements of

To

my father,

Joseph

Amato (igi2-ig8g)

CONTENTS

Foreword, by Jeffrey Burton Russell / Introduction: Little Things

Mean

1.

Of Times When Dust Was

the

2.

Old Metaphors and

3.

Early Discernment of the Minute / 47

4.

The Great Cleanup

5.

Atoms and Microbes: New Guides Invisible

New

/

ix

Lot /

a

i

Companion of

All

/

15

Measures of the Microcosm / 36

67 to the Small

and

/ 92

6.

Discerning the Invisible for the

7.

Lighting

8.

The Snake

Up

the

Still

Conclusion:

Good

of the Nation /

no

Microcosm / 126 Lurks / 143

Who

Will Tremble at These Marvels?

Notes / 179 Bibliographic Essay /

221

Personal Thoughts and Thanks / 237

/

157

FOR EWO R JEFFREY BURTON RUSSELL

What

is

dust?

We

all

know what

it

looks

like, especially

dust mice under the bed. But what in fact

is it?

when

One way

to

it

forms

answer

is

the scientifically mechanical. Unlike such exotic dusts as interstellar particles,

ordinary house dust

of human skin, shreds of dust

is

a medical

a

is

fabric,

mixture of dead insect parts, flakes

and other unpleasing materials. House

problem because

it is

the

home of whole

of microscopic dust mites, which eat human skin

twenty times

a day,

and produce

a

new

populations

particles, excrete

generation every three weeks.

Millions of people in the United States alone suffer severe allergic reactions to mite excreta and thus to dust.

inated

by

substantial quantities of animal

When

house dust

is

contam-

and human excreta,

it

becomes

and

infectious

is

As

often called "dirt."

dirt,

dust becomes a vector of

disease and a severe health problem.

At

point the nature of dust becomes a historical and conceptual

this

as well as a scientific question:

we can

the centuries have defined dust, reacted to

been defeated by against

it.

One answer

people have thought

it

people through

tolerated

it,

it,

attacked

it,

during the Dust Bowl), and even legislated

(as

it

how

investigate

to the conceptual question

to

is

that dust

is

what

be through the centuries. That approach links

the history of dust with the history of the minuscule, "the small and the invisible."

Through

vast stretches of time past, people have thought

of dust as the smallest possible thing, leading to expressions such as "fine as dust" or "less than dust."

In this original and eloquent

work of

interdisciplinary synthesis,

Joseph Amato melds his firm grasp of the history of concepts with social, medical,

policy,

and

political history;

with the history of hygiene, public

and the natural sciences. All of Amato's work has shown

this

extraordinary combination of the finely philosophical {Mounier and Maritain, 1975) with the concrete and particular Conspire:

A Minnesota Farm Murder^

commitment {Victims and

book of

and

mind-opening experience.

ical,

a

all; it is

1988) and with personal and moral

Values^ I992.)- Dxist

thetic

the most richly syn-

both narrative and analytical, both a pleasure It is

a personal, practical,

history of the concept of dust

is

psycholog-

essentially the history

concept of the minute and minuscule. As such,

mous transformation

when

/

is

and philosophical book.

The

X

{When Father and Son

in the late nineteenth

it

of the

underwent an enor-

and twentieth centuries,

microscopes, electron microscopes, and particle accelerators de-

fOKiWORD

moted (or promoted) dust from the microcosmic

A

grain of house dust

particle

is

roughly halfway

and the planet Earth.

And

human mind can understand only

The world is

between

in size

in

a

subatomic

quantum mechanics, which

mathematically.

which we discuss quarks, neutrinos,

in

mesocosmic.

the world of the subatomic meets

with the world of the inconceivably vast the

to the

DNA,

and viruses

very different from the world people inhabited and envisioned before

the nineteenth century. Then, the smallest thing

known was

and dust was the commonest metaphor for anything of low

Roman

as a

repeating,

dust

itself,

status. Just

general riding in triumph always had a slave behind

"Remember, you

are only a

him

man," so Christians have been

reminded yearly on Ash Wednesday, "Remember that you are dust and will return to dust."

Everything on earth was corruptible; only the

cosmos beyond the moon was immutable. And beyond the cosmological

was the

small.''

theological.

Was God

What was

the ultimate

meaning of great and

great, or small, or both, or neither.''

Beside the conceptual history of the minuscule

good or

bad.''

Is

eradicated.'' Is dust

dirt.''

Is dirt dangerous.''

Is tininess

it

to

cultural history.

is its

be praised or execrated, accepted or Dirt and dust dominated

the lives of people everywhere before the nineteenth century; in places, they

still

do.

More people

—

an estimated three billion

living today without rudimentary hygiene than lived at

any time

most

—

are

in the

past.

The

tiny

was

a matter of wonderment

from the time

that

Democritus

and Lucretius speculated on the existence of atoms. In early European culture

it

was seen

as the mysterious source

onically but in the sense that

some

life

of

life

actually arose

(not only

embry-

from the inanimate

JEFFREY BURTON RUSSELL

/

xi

minuscule by spontaneous generation). death and disease.

The

ignored hygiene

nonsense. But

is

what they were up

Only

in the course

With

was

also seen as a cause

claim that medieval and early it is

of

modern people

true that they did not understand

against.

of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did

hygiene evolve from a tem.

It

ritual

or a matter of comfort to a scientific sys-

the discovery of the microscope

came

the discovery of the

microbe and the mechanisms of disease transmission. Doctors and nurses began to wash their hands between patients. Housewives and

housemaids mounted an ever more furious attack on dust, which had

been clearly demonstrated source of disease.

Amato

as evil:

calls the

it

was

dirt,

the

home of germs and the

period from the mid-nineteenth to the

mid-twentieth century "the great cleanup." Dust and

dirt

became ene-

mies that had to be controlled, both by individuals with vacuum sweepers

and by governments with sewage systems and hygiene programs. But the great cleanup has had two ironic aspects. The

technology, while producing

more ways of controlling

enormously

and dangers of dust

to the varieties

dioactive particles, smog, and toxic chemicals.

in

first is

dust, has

that

added

such forms as ra-

The second

is

that since

the 1960s people living in advanced societies have increasingly and

dangerously ignored the hard-won lessons of hygiene. Just as young

Americans

in the

1960s took wealth for granted,

today are taking health for granted. But, as

war on dust and

dirt

young Americans

Amato makes

has not brought a victory over disease.

For better and for worse, dust has had dramatic and, since 1945, even cosmic effects. here.

xii

/

FOREWORD

clear, the

It

social, scientific,

deserves a history.

It

has one

v INTRODUCTION-

MEAN

LITTLE THINGS Vast

no

No

is

the

limits.

kingdom of

No

parallels

dust! Unlike terrestrial

kingdoms,

No

mountains

ocean marks

can the farthermost stars

—

Mothered by the same

— —

Dust Dirt

finer

its

boundaries.

of latitude and longitude define in the infinitudes

J.

and more discrete

—

knows

it

hem

it

in.

boundless areas, nor

of space serve other than itself.

Gordon Ogden, The Kingdom of Dust

earth, dust

bigger and clumsier

its

of a realm as vast as the universe

as a rwinkling outpost

LOT

A

and

—belongs

is

dirt

as

have different

much

fathers.

to air as to earth.

identified with soil.

When

wet, dirt

reveals a closer kinship to water than to dust. But dirt's real father,

which vouches

for

precise, excrement.

its

closer affinity to the soil,

This book

is

of

life

and

as a

or, to

be more

dust than dirt;

it is

measure of the small

this century.

Once, not so long ago, dust constituted the eye could

muck

much more about

about dust's role as a condition of until the start

is

see. In the

form of gold dust or

finest

thing the

human

pollen, as light filaments that

covered the skin, or as individual particles that spun

in the sunlight,

dust

was the most minuscule thing people encountered. Like darkness and skin, dust

was an omnipresent boundary,

in this case

between the

visible

A grain

and the

invisible. In

ofpollen

advanced twentieth-century

society, visible dust

has been removed from the surface of most things, and the

by

dust has been opened to examination

been studied, regulated

in industry

ings, in public buildings,

position,

is

now seen as

and on the

and

scientific instruments. It

society,

streets.

and controlled

preindustrial world, dust has

many

been swept

has

in dwell-

Dust, always varied in com-

a highly diverse particulate

microscopic exactness. Along with so

kingdom of

and

a matter

of sub-

other minute things of the

to the edges

of contemporary

society and, thus, to the margins of contemporary consciousness.

As with redefined

all

by

that

was once considered

really small, dust has

a great twentieth-century revolution

—

been

a revolution of the

minuscule. Denied the intellectual fanfare of the astronomical revolution,

which removed the earth from the center of the universe and

declared the universe infinite, this revolution of the petite declared the infinity

of the infinitesimal.

It

has forced

humans

mensity and might of the small. For the

first

to recognize the

im-

time ever, at least for

those with inquisitive minds, the world below became as vast, fascinating, and powerful as the heavens above.

2

/

INTROD UCTION

The

modern

roots of this revolution he in early

development of perceptions of

made human goods and

finely

history, with the

the

first

microscopic

has been sustained with the discovery of mi-

reality. It

crobes and the diagnosis and cure of viral and bacterial diseases; the reading of

DNA

fusion of atoms. identification

and the deciphering of genes; and the division and

Among

its

consequences was the end of the perennial

of dust and smallness.

common measure

dust: the Throughout the

ages, dust has been the

of smallness. Dust

is

the coins of the realm

themselves, bit by

common measure

of the divisibility of matter.' Even the

a result

hardest materials erode and

and most

first

become

dust.

The

ivory of piano keys and

become smooth and worn over

bit, to dust.^

time, adding

Softer materials abundantly supply the

microscopic stuff that flows around the islands of perceptible and palpable objects.

An

average puff of a cigarette has been estimated to

contain 4 billion particles of dust. plate

—

water dust, so to speak

of writing paper.

A

—

The vapor

is

on

a dry

500,000 times thinner than a sheet

musk perfumes

grain of

that condenses

a

room

for years,

and a

single grain of indigo colors a ton of water.

Amorphous, dust ous.

With

is

found within

the atmosphere,

all

forms the envelope that mediates the

it

earth's interaction with the universe.^

and crosses the widest air

of

The

body.

comes flake

streets. It

comes

finest dust

seas. It

to rest

—

fills

It flies

the

over the highest mountains

still

everywhere

air

of

home and

in nature

in the

It falls

course of a year

the busy

and on the human

dust that can enter the pores of

to rest in the oceans' depths.

of snow, and

things, solid, liquid, or vapor-

human

skin

with every drop of rain and it

can cover the rooftops of

INTRODUCTION

/

j

buildings with tons of fine debris.

Even

in the cleanest conditions,

it

has been estimated, "there are over a thousand motes of dust in every cubic inch of air."^

Dust

is

everywhere because

its

source

is

everything.

Its

most remote

origins in time and space are the Big Bang, collapsing stars, and the

dark

of the Milky Way, which, according to

line across the center

astronomer Donald Brownlee, years across, and 3.832

X

10''

"is a line

of

dirt

perhaps 65,200 light-

miles long."^ Here on earth, dust comes

from everything under the sun: minerals, seeds, pollen, lichens,

and even bacteria.

molds,

sources also include bone, hair, hide,

Its

And

and excrement.

feather, skin, blood,

insects,

things of

too numerous to mention, also cover the earth and

human fill

fabrication,

the atmosphere

with dust.

Dust goes where the wind

lists.

As

if it

were nothing

mass, without volume, the featherweight of featherweights

and forms a vapor and haze. Indeed, these

German word

logical origin in the is

as fine

and familiar a thing

While doubtless

as the

qualities

— —

at all

it

evoke

its

without rises

etymo-

Dunst, which means vapor."^ Dust

unaided

human eye can

perceive.

certain dusts are identified with precious metals

life-giving pollens (which themselves once

smallest things), dust

commonly

were used

though dust can be

what

is

to

and

measure the

travels with the children of earth: dirt,

mud, and muck. Unnoticed, trodden underfoot, the lowliest things, with

it is

associated with

broken, discarded, and formless. Al-

identified with the precious essence of things,

most regular associates are fragments, morsels, chips, and nicks.

It is

up

its

tailings, splinters, scraps, shreds,

commonly

identified with the trivial,

meager, petty, scanty, puny, and picayune. For these reasons, dust

4

/

INTRODUCTION

would appear rious

enough

Dust air,

to

be neither a subject worthy of reflection nor merito-

to serve a history

of smallness.

as an element cannot claim the glory of light, the subtlety of

the solidity of earth, or the vitality of water, even though

galaxies, circles planets,

and hides

in the

why and how humans

and daylight, with the array of

plains blue skies

we

for

power

cherish. Dust's refracting

visible radiation

—

Dust forms the ceaseless things.

Out of

it

tides

see light rich

also explains

reaches the earth in

envelops

bedrooms of kings and queens.

Scattered throughout the atmosphere and the universe,

power helps account

it

its

its

refracting

itself. It

and diffuse colors

why

so

little

light

long trek from the sun.^

of the becoming and dissolution of

things are made; into

it

they dissolve. So constant, so

pervasive, dust, aggregating and disintegrating, gauges matter

way

to

ex-

and from being. So dust would seem

to

on

its

measure history and

the historian, not the reverse.

Dusts are part of the earth's continual making and unmaking. Desert the skies for thousands of miles and change seasons, vege-

storms

fill

tation,

and landscapes. Over centuries, blown dust accumulates into

geological structures like the loess

hills

of Iowa and the

cliffs

of north-

west China, composed of deposited dust from the Gobi Desert. These structures shape

human

life.

Volcanoes shower the earth with

fine particles

of dust. The largest

volcanic eruptions have been estimated to affect ten thousand square

miles of the earth and to form

mushroom

clouds that

of the atmosphere. (The eruptions from Mount

St.

rise to the

edge

Helens shot up

twelve miles into the sky.)^ Volcanic dust, which has altered the entire world's climate by impeding sunlight and shortening growing seasons,

INTRODUCTION

/

$

mi.

^r~>»l

_^

f

Dust storm

may have known

accounted for the

ice ages.

in Scandinavia, Britain,

The weather of

the year 1816,

and the United States

as "the year

without a summer," was the result of a volcanic eruption in Sumbawa, Indonesia.^

Even dust.

fires

and explosions have made

The Chicago

their

mark

in the history

of

Fire of 1871 poured such large quantities of ash into

the sky that forty days afterward the cinders reached the Azores, in the

middle of the North Adantic.'" The 1954 hydrogen

bomb

test in the

Bikini Islands spread radioactive dust particles over seven thousand

square miles. Surely, dust impinges on

Dust

also leaves

instance with

human

fingerprints

/

I

on

history.

a landscape.

To

which contemporary North Americans are most

dust imprinted the "Dirty Thirties."

6

human

NTROD UCTION

From

take the familiar,

1932 to 1938, the so-called

Dust Bowl covered 1^0,000 square miles of the American

No

ing 60 percent of the people there to emigrate."

American Midwest

in the

1930s

monia."

It

colored

—

it

history of the

mention dust-darkened

day into night. Dust found

dust-filled ditches, dust turning

people's beds and food;

fails to

plains, caus-

its

skies,

way

into

tore at their skin and caused "dust pneu-

or darkened

—

the

way people

felt

about

life

and

more than dry

themselves. However, the Dirty Thirties were about

and dusty times. They were also about the consequences of expanded agriculture and unregulated grazing practices plains.'-

Each handful of dust judged

a people's

on the American

central

management of its

land.

NEW DUSTS, NEW MEASURES Human

beings have been changing the earth and kicking up dust ever

since their origin.

Long

work with

it

things:

we worked. We made

ago, dust was the

indicated

dust

how much,

common measure

with what, and

when we dug, sawed,

when we broke and

laid tracks.

trails, laid

how

snapped,

drilled,

crushed, ground, polished, pulverized, and milled.

of our

We made

finely filed,

dust fly

foundations, erected structures, built roads,

Human engines

—from

early windmills to coal-burning

steam engines to contemporary nuclear reactors

—

discharge dusts that

determine the character of regions.

Though

there

is

no etymological connection between the words

i^ust

and industry, industrial societies created more, and more varied, dusts than had any previous society."

Armed

with

steel tools,

dynamite, and

bulldozers, industrial society transformed the earth, belching unprec-

edented amounts and varieties of dusts into the environment. For the sake of cotton irrigation in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, rivers were

INTRODUCTION

/

7

diverted from die Aral Sea, shrinking and salinizing die sea and pro-

ducing a

salt-filled

dusty wind that caused lung ailments.

By all previous

measures, industrial society was the great earth mover and, conse-

quendy, the great dust maker.

Every industry

creates a peculiar dust

and smoke. Because of

and because of climatic conditions, each industrial distinguishing haze and smog.

The darkened

cirs'

had

this,

own

its

skvline of turn-of-the-

cenrurv Minneapolis grain mills was different from that painted by the steel

foundries of Garv, Indiana. Contemporan,- Chicago's air pollution

differs

the

from

same

that of

Los Angeles, and the smog of Los Angeles

is

not

as London's.'"*

Dusts varv bv time as well

belong to and define

bv

as

and place. They both

activity'

The

distinct historical periods.

under bombardment during World

War

don smogs of the postwar period. In

II

differed

dusts ot

London

from the great Lon-

the dusts of Auschwitz's crematoria

historians detect a different moral accusation

from the one they

find in

the radioactive dusts of Chernobvl.

Dusts, which contemporarv

sensibility' is

disposed to consider only

as pollutants, also reveal a history of beneficial service to

suggest just a few of

examples, dust has furnished rich minerals

make

bricks, ceramics,

and

provided chalk for writing, clav bases for cosmetics,

talc

and supplemented glass. It has

manv

humans. To

for drying bodies,

soils. It

and

has been used to

a range of powders for such basic

manufacturing

processes as purification, grinding, desiccation, adhesion, aggregation,

and pigmentation. Powdered peat runs

trains in

Sweden. Clays are used

for a vast range of products.'' Essential for agricultural and industrial

processes and products, dusts also protect plants against cold and in-

8

/

INTROD UCTION

they

sects;

filter liquids.

means of getting

best

Today

Dust can be both an essence of things and the

at the

essence of other things.

society lives relatively free of visible dust. Indeed,

some com-

puter factories and laboratories are designed to be without a single particle

of dust in them

contemporary

— and being Its

of dust has become a uniquely

however, dust accompanied humans

ideal. In the past,

always and everywhere.

free

invasions were as certain as the changing

of the seasons. Starting in the nineteenth century,

new

(many of which were studied under microscopes) dusts in

urban

New and

home and

life.

The

much of the

joined traditional

sight, feel,

quantity of dust increased with the

and smell of

hubbub of the

cities.

dusts accompanied the steam engine, the locomotive, and the iron

steel industries

before. Coal

Yet in

street, defining

industrial dusts

it is

and

when human

beings chewed up the earth as never

had a particular association with industry.

silicon dusts

not accidental that in nineteenth-century industrial society

England

first

and foremost

—

enemy by

dust was declared an

public

health officials. Sanitarians asserted a relationship between dust and disease. Industrial hygienists

maladies

The

among miners and

demonstrated that dusts caused a range of other industrial workers.

processes that caused so

means and

much

the desire to control them.

teenth century, Western society had It

compounded

this desire

dust and waste gave society the

By

begun

the last quarter of the nineto sanitize

and cleanse

itself.

with a moral ideal of purity. Governments

ordered delousing, pasteurizing, and

sterilizing.

of ordinances against dusts, trash, noise, and,

They

directed a range

United States,

in the

whatever other material and moral turpitude could be trapped under the

wide statutory net of "unwanted nuisances." In the same period,

I

NTRODUCTIOS

/

9

homes became

women and

the target of domestic cleaning manuals that advised

servants

how

home and

to protect

family against dusts and

other minuscule invaders. Different institutions advocated different

The regime of

cleaning regimens. the public school,

which

the factory. All dusts

the

army barracks was not

in turn differed

became defined

that of

from those of the hospital and

targets of state

and national health

campaigns.

However,

way

most sectors of

in

until the 1930s

society, fighting dust

made

little

head-

and 1940s. Even though the switch from horses

to

automobiles, the paving of streets, and the seeding of lawns had already

diminished dusts considerably, until then there simply were not enough tools

and products to scour the environments where

abounded. As remorseless as the

tide,

dust was thrown up

ing of steam engines and tracked up and ings,

and

it

made

itself at

home

down

streets

and pests

dirt

by

the churn-

and into build-

of ill-kept goods of

in the collection

everyday households.

While the public conquest of dust involved technologies, the battle against domestic dust

hold trenches. vices: the

Its

all

of society and

in the house-

new

cleaning de-

instruments included an array of

washing machine by 1950 had become a wonderful synthetic

electric lighting

were

windows allowed

women

a revolution

light to penetrate

thorough removal of

dust.

work, cared

homes, aiding housekeepers

However,

this

/

JNTROD UCTION

in their

triumph over dust did not

an opportunity to bathe in glory.

little

Gas and

unto themselves. More and larger

Women

guardians of an order that men, occupied with the

lo

new

was fought

creation of enameled steel, aluminum, Bakelite, and rubber.

give

its

for or took for granted. Like dirt

affairs

became the of street and

and dust

itself,

the

art

and hibor of keeping

household were devalued by

a spick-and-span

new

innovative cleaning machines and products and contested by a

generation ot working daughters in

housework."' All

this left the

who had

time for and

less interest

accomplished housewives of the

half of the century diminished in

ambiguous

little

number and occupying

first

a place as

The housewife was

in significance as the dust they cleaned.

swept to the edges of society, along with sanitarians, hygienists, and legions of others

who once

fought dust with the

accolades of an

full

era that took itself to be locked in a life-and-death struggle against

it.

INVISIBLE THINGS Today,

in industrialized societies,

over dust

is

forgotten, especially

previous generations' great victory

by

the

young and

though ceaseless mopping-up operations must throughout less

society.

Dust and

worrisome than such

dirt,

and

invisible fresh

all

well-off,

be carried on

still

their ageless tiny allies, are

opponents

as radioactivity

drug-resistant microbes.

Our

porary

maintain the elaborate post-Communion

priests' failure to

even

and

current neglect of dust shows in contem-

of cleaning up the crumbs of the Eucharist on the

altar

and

in

ritual

home-

owners' propensity to use gasoline-powered blowers to shoot dust away

from

their

threat

it

own

property with no concern for where

might pose to public health. Because

and fears dust as tions, especially in play)

of old

is

With

it

lands or what

no longer considers

once did, contemporary society (with

when

many

excep-

matters of personal hygiene and appearance are

no longer values cleaning and cleaners no longer

it

it

as lethal as

it

as highly.'^

The

small

was.

order, sanitation, and cleanliness generally secured, society

INTRODUCTION

/

i

i

could begin to focus on the worst forms of pollution and contagion as defined

by public

sensibility

and by emerging ranks of pathologists,

pollution control officers, and epidemiologists.

It is

the profession of

these forensic scientists of the environment to identify and

microscopically toxic and contagious entities. as a threat, old-fashioned dust lost

its

No

place and

its

remove

longer seen in ability to

itself

command

attention.

Ideas about dust have undergone a revolution in the last century

and a

Dust has been transformed from an enduring condition

half.

an enemy of sanitary civilization, and then to a precise object of entific

to

sci-

knowledge and technological manipulation. At the same time,

the discoveries of atoms and

germs

—and

croscopic entities and concepts they sustain

nuscule and emphatically denied dust

its

whole network of mi-

the

—have

redefined the mi-

role as humanity's

primary

gauge of smallness. In this newly discovered microcosm, dust does not outsparkle

competitors in this magnificently intricate universe of ular things.

Dust has been diminished and

its

real

little

and

its

partic-

and metaphorical

powers weakened.

With unprecedented control of water,

light,

and materials,

industrial

technology empowered society not only to remove dust but also to redefine

with

it

as distinct particulates.

soil, dirt,

Dust

and muck and became

a multifaceted object

porary science. To use an analogy, dust, peasant,

became

refined forms

it

in the city a

lost all kinship

more

lost its traditional associations

like its

/

INTROD UCTION

counterpart the

individualistic entity. In

its

most

with the dust of yesteryear and vanished

into the microscopic suburbs of smallness.

12

human

of contem-

In

tlie city,

laboratories

it

became ever more

dust

was analyzed, taken

apart,

different ways. Dissected in light of

and put together

new knowledge and

in entirely

technology,

dust was no longer the clodhopper from the countryside. Instead

caught up

in science's

and

particularized. In factories

it

was

discovery of the vastness and intricacy of the

microcosm.

The contemporary

history of dust straddles three paradoxes. First,

the Industrial Revolution,

which created so much dust and so many

kinds of dust, also permitted society to regulate dust as never before.

Second, sight

at the

same time

and hand,

entities smaller

ments and

that the great cleanup

specialists delineated entire

than dust.

tools. Just as

They

exposed dust to human

undiscovered realms of

did this with ever

more

precise instru-

people were being rescued from the tyrannies

of dust, they found themselves introduced to legions of unseen things, things

whose

effect

on personal and national well-being could not be

denied. In sum, the majority found themselves having to

make

sense

out of invisible lethal things whose existence they could not doubt but for

whose observation and understanding they were not equipped.

Third, while science and technology have defined and ordered enor-

mous microscopic

may have

deed,

it

better

life

realms, the elemental fear of the small persists. Inincreased, fostered

by growing expectations

for a

and armies of invisible things that threaten them. The unseen

remains fraught with danger. Within ghosts are

now

joined

stray meteorites.

New

by

its

realm ancient bogeymen and

threats of extraterrestrials, cosmic rays,

discoveries induce

new

fears,

and

which themselves

can be compounded by fashionable obsessions and mass panic. In the

first

half of this century. Western civilization

was beset by the

I

NTRODUCTIOS

/

ij

second

fear of germs. In the

planted

by

has been significantly sup-

half, this fear

fears of radioactivity,

environmental pollution, and, most

recently, reinvigorated diseases. In differing forms, the old preoccu-

pations with invisible enemies persist.

However

impressive science's

conquest of the microcosm, the great majority has not fully accepted science's

knowledge of and dominance over the

are

predicated on the premise that

still

God

that a merciful will

command

the

mind can control matter and

God who numbers

the hairs

individual cells and electrons to save

Surrendering not

—

human

fate to the

on our heads

human

lives.

determined course of atoms does

has not resigned

befit a species that

Common prayers

small.

itself to its

return to dust.

who

Indeed, this reluctance to be pulverized remains strong in those

have tasted the

of the pleasing garden of contemporary

fruit

life.

Our

unwillingness to go gende into that good night stems not just from a poet's exhortation but

from membership

in a civilization that, since the

Middle Ages, has insisted on controlling things great and small

been

civilization that has

less

and

less satisfied

—

with leaving the details

to the devil.

However, atoms and microbes and invisible and

—have

to consider the

—contemporary

guides to the small

forced people to confront realms of unseen entities

awesome power of small

things.

Though few people

grasp these infinitesimal worlds, none can ignore their potency. Cells

and computer chips,

to

mention two examples,

small things to captivate

once more than anything

human thought and literally

and formed the gateway to the

14

/

universe existed.

INTROD UCTION

action.

Dust

power of

itself,

which

and metaphorically defined smallness

invisible,

the expanding universe of the small. this

illustrate the

A

now

is

but a mere

century ago

we

member of

hardly

knew

\ _CJ1APTE R

ONE

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF AIL OF TIMES

In the sweat of thy face shah thou eat bread, the ground; for out of

it

thou return unto

—

unto dust shah thou return.

If dust rises

till

wast thou taken: for dust thou

high and sharp, vehicles are coming;

art,

and

Genesis 3:19

if

it is

low and

wide, foot soldiers are coming. Scattered wisps of smoke indicate

woodcutters. Relatively small amounts of dust coming and going indicate setting

In times before industry,

— Sun Tzu, The

up camp.

when

were intimate with dust

in

agriculture dominated,

small and fine things, dust

one was

War

men and women

ways beyond contemporary imagination.

Dust accompanied them throughout

many

Art of

this as true as for the

their days.

Although they saw

was commonly the

peasant

who

lived

by

smallest.

For no

the earth.

After offering a definition and discussion of dust in the preindustrial

world, this chapter looks

at the relationship to

peasant of the Middle Ages.

were closer

to or farther

It

does

this

dust of the European

not because European peasants

from dust than,

for example, the first peasants

of the agricultural revolution of ten thousand years ago in the Near East, or twentieth-century peasants of the

ern Europe, Asia, or Africa. Rather,

it

remote countryside of East-

dwells on medieval European

«j

peasants because they provide a gauge of Western civilization's ascent

from

fine

and minute things for the few,

many,

for the

to

to sanitation

and cleanHness

our contemporary expert manipulation of the sub-

microscopic and atomic orders.

THE EVERYDAY COMPANION Throughout most of on the

the world's history, dust

surfaces of things, piling

Even though most

mark

invisible

formed by

air,

boundary of the

things,

small.

the spores of

as an

Beyond exist.

mushrooms

sprinkling their seed-bearing powder.

ultrafine airborne seeds

to a fraction of

by

castles.

went unseen, dust

and magical realm was believed to

was formed, among other exploded into the

the

in the air, settling

dark corners of huts and

in

individual dust particles

entity functioned to

boundary an

up

was

It

that

Dust that

was

(sometimes hundreds of thousands

an ounce) or by "antbread," a barely visible part of a

tiny seed that ants drag to their nests

and which,

if

uneaten, springs up

into plants.'

In

its

smallest and

and magical

to

most deeply hidden forms, dust was too hermitic

be understood. Yet

Its rising particles,

shimmering

its

existence could not be denied.

in the light, appeared

and disappeared

before one's eyes. Finely ground dusts of plants and minerals put a telling taste in stews

for the mind,

and made powerful medicines for the body, drugs

and even deadly poisons.

Dusts brought smells: the unpleasant smells of the old, the stench of the pig farmer, the putrid breath from rotting

i6

/

teeth,

scent of the fresh skin of one's lover.

Unseen dusts

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

and the pleasing

circulated through

the

mingling with water vapor and forming snowflakes. Fire

air,

wood, and

the air with the smell of burning

reach far inland

when

the

winds were

There was no escaping dust great

ments

or

fires,

—

fire,

in

when volcanoes

right.

to

mud

and

dirt,

— and

which

Dust came from animals and

air

it

was

like

which are

an element

itself.

Water

trans-

dusts.

dried and blew around as dust.

plants, clung to bodies,

and pervaded

dwellings whose walls, floors, and roofs were com-

clothing.

It filled

posed of

mud and

asleep and

harvest times, during

at

erupted. Dust accompanied the ele-

Fire turned objects to ashes and soot,

formed earth

the smell of sea salt could

dry seasons,

and water

earth, air,

filled

thatch. All over the world, people of times past

woke up

in

dusty beds.

People made dust whatever they did. dust mills. People

fell

made

dust

Human bodies themselves were

when they rubbed

their

hands together

or ground food with their teeth (especially with their molars, whose

etymological origin

is

mola^ millstone).

materials that over time

from the nose; phlegm,

from the

hair.

From

manure was plowed and became

manure not be

dust.

saliva,

the anus

The body

to dust:

wax from

the ears;

mucus

and vomit from the mouth; dandruff

came waste, which along with animal

into the earth

for the earth.

made

would turn

Out of human bodies came

itself

and made into

was fodder

for

soil.

There

it

dried

worms and provided

There was nothing on earth so big

that

it

might

small.

However, dust was about more than discarded

materials. Certain

dusts not only provided essential goods but were treasured in themselves.

Powdered

spices flavored cooking. Specialized dusts served cos-

metics and pharmacy with colors and powders to beautify, to soothe,

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

/

17

to enchant,

and to intoxicate. Animal and human wastes turn to pow-

ders, dusts that serve important purposes.^

Even

in

more

among common

recent times, at least

Common

taken to contain the essence of things.

sweeping dust out the front door because luck. "It

boded

sweep away ill.

trade.

Bodily wastes

were understood

to

—

.

.

then no

embody

Communion

a person's essence

mummies from

table.

cious than the crumbs of the

made from

Ages and was not outranked

After

body of

the age's finest grain.

Pillsbury put four

harm it

is

clean a house or fireplace perfectly

and emanate special

Persia were ground

as medicine.'^ Folklore records the great healing

dust from the

when

.

associated with dust as a part of the earth

powers.^ In medieval Europe,

and sold

might take away a family's

swept out of the shop door,

is

To

"'*

was

prescriptions forbade

must be swept inwards and carried out

will follow." Similarly, "if dust

said to

it

folk, dust

It

its

powers of

what could be more pre-

Christ.*^

(Communion bread was

was marked triple-X

until the

Xs on

all,

up

in the

Middle

end of the nineteenth century,

bags of flour to suggest the ultimate

in fineness.)^

DUST AS M ETAPH OR In the metaphorical universe of opposites from which their cultural significance, dust

and

humans

construct

form a negative pole. These

dirt

half-brothers reside with the weak, the lowly, and the amoral.*

gathers with the rejected; found under beds,

names beggar's

i8

/

velvet, house moss,

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION

and

slut's

OF ALL

it

Dust

was given the slang

wool. Dust

is

associated

my

with death ("to bite the dust"), witli insuh ("eat dismissal ("to dust oft"). Dirt refers to

what

is

morally compromising

("get the dirt on" or "throw dirt at" someone). a "piece of dirt" are insignificant. In

American

dust"), and with

A

"speck of dust" or

slang, people of lower

socioeconomic classes are described as "muck worms" or

"mud

sills."

To

Lesser individuals are described as "chicken feed" and "crumb."

be a nobody person Like

is

is

to be a

its

be "a

to

little

snot" or "a litde shit"; to be an ill-bred

"dreg" or a "grub."

close associate, dirt, dust defined

human

experience from

beginning. Dust, in the form of soot and ashes, revealed where

fire

its

had

burned and things had been transformed. Rising dust indicated commotion (hence the phrase "to kick up dust"). As any good ancient general or medieval condottierre knew, different forms of dust in the

sky could indicate either distant enemy campfires or approaching armies.

Dust could mark human or climatic damage erodes most severely where

soils are finest

to the earth:

wind

and where they have been

most abused. Blowing dusts could mark

a barren land, like the Sahara

Desert, or an abandoned

Asma, northeast of Baghdad.

They could be

city, like Tell

the source of the pall that

hung over

cities

and poisoned

lands and waters.'^

Conversely, some dusts, such as gold dust, were regarded as the essence of the most valuable things.

The

finest dusts

to be the lightest earthly thing. In fairy tales, a

were considered

mere sprinkle of dust

could cause wondrous things to occur. Dust's ambiguous metaphorical place as both the most ordinary and

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

/

19

the finest of things derived

and unseen. Like

its

role as a frontier

skin, a tissue that stands

exterior, dust separated

lay

from

beyond them. In

between the seen

between the

interior

and the

what could be known by the senses and what

this respect

dust was like darkness:

it

formed a

graduated and permeable screen between the realm of what was empirically

known and

the realm of the imagined. In

it

images appear and

vanish, things are transformed and even generated. Dust formed a

shadowy realm

that harbored secret exchanges

and sponsored unex-

pected transformations. Associated with caves and cellars and other

such places where neither light nor darkness entirely prevailed, dust

was an ambiguous reservoir of important and unimportant,

living

and

reality.

All

dead.

Human

observation confirmed dust's elemental role in

things broke

by

down

into smaller things. All matter could be

force, fire, or rot.

Dust

—

variegated and omnipresent

made

dust

—formed

the

elemental particles of everything on earth, except in the minds of a

handful of classical atomists,

who

insisted that

beyond dust there were

yet smaller particles (atoms) that accounted for the

making of

making and un-

things.

People observed with their senses that the smallest living creatures bugs, spiders, and

worms

—were

spontaneously in dusty places.

creatures of dust.

Worms

They generated

appeared in compost

piles,

mag-

gots formed in rotting meat, cockroaches were born from scraps of

food that

fell

to the floor,

and mice sprang out of dirty boxes

left in

undisturbed darkness.

People of the preindustrial, rural order grasped intuitively what con-

temporary people

20

/

strain to imagine: the eternal cycle

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

of all living things.

It

made

after

God

sense to them that

all,

what

else

was

used

available?

— and

along with the mightiest monarchs,

of

earlier eras did not

words,

"A man may

spit

and earth

to

make humans

they had no doubt that they,

made good food

for

worms. People

have to reach to comprehend Shakespeare's

fish

worm

with the

eat of the fish that hath fed of that

and

that hath eat of a king,

worm."'"

THE IMMORTAL STRUGGLE Men and women

of preindustrial times used the

culture to differentiate themselves to

which the

life

of their

from the small and degrading things

cycle chained them. For the sake of continuity of self

and the autonomy of being to rise

full possibilities

—

them

for the angel within

—

they strove

above the muck and slime, the worms and vermin, the gnats

and ants that surrounded them." With taboos and

rituals against the

contaminated and the polluted, and with elevating and sublimating religious conceptions, they sought to transcend the biology that ruled their bodies. dirt eaters,

They

insisted that they

"Memento, homo, quia

member, man, of dust you In Purity

people

solely to the church's Lenten

are,

and

to dust

and Danger^ Mary Douglas

flee dust.

She contends

cookie cutter didn't cut

—

warn-

pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris." (Re-

that dust

cultural constructions of order. '^

state

just the dust grovelers,

and excrement makers they knew themselves to be. They

would not have themselves reduced ing:

were not

you

will return.)

offers another reason

and

Dust and

why

dirt are the detritus

dirt

—

leftovers,

of

what the

constitute a kind of disorder, an inchoate

of being, and thus a type of moral defilement. For twentieth-

century people to understand

this,

Douglas counsels, they must

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

set

ALL

/

ai

Ant

aside current notions about taboos serving primitive hygiene codes and

make an modern

of

effort to conceive

bacteriology.'^

By

dirt

avoidance before

it

was shaped by

freeing dust and dirt from recent concepts

of pathogens and hygiene, contemporary people discover that dust and dirt

were

To be

traditionally associated with transgressors

dirty,

or grovel in the

dirt,

and transgressions.

connoted indecency and immorality.'''

Steering clear of dust and dirt sustained the cultural order, affirmed

moral rectitude, and, most important, assured those that they

were

is

another reason

why

traditional people distanced

These substances are commonly asso-

themselves from dust and

dirt.

ciated with degeneration,

which produces not

integrity but also the

/

clean

also morally pure.

Perhaps there

22

who were

bodily

just threats to

most unpleasant sensual experiences. The smell

of putrefaction can cause people to vomit as a matter of physical

reflex.'^

And

accom-

with

it

comes

the revolting sight of the oozing forms that

pany decomposition of organic

materials. Its

deep purples, and thick yellows

—awaken

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

odd

colors

—dark

fears of death.

The

reds,

white,

almost translucent, maggots that accompany decomposition further

evoke the threshold of chaos. The powers of the putrid, which contaminate dust

by

association, are concentrated in garbage piles, in

knows

heaps, and on battlefields. Every hunter, peasant, and cook rot does death's

work.

It is

no surprise

compost that

that religious legends held that

only the bodies of saints and devils escaped putrefaction after death.

DUST AND DIRT Nineteenth-century Romantics, preferring the earthy people to the middle class, equated dirt with

even manure

—was by

nutrient. Dust, to the refined

for

things basic. Dirt

all

them the

contrast,

land's substance

was seen

as

—

as soil, earth,

and the nation's moral

removed from

and the desiccated. In making

and

life. It

belonged

this distinction the

Ro-

mantics identified dirt as grit and ordure and dust as part of a cloud of

vapor or smoke. This lineage dirt

supported etymologically:

is

was borrowed from Old Norse German-based

toric

drit that also

Jrit,

which goes back

produced the Dutch

century

—

after the

word manure

Lighter than

dirt,

is

in the

mud

and

seventeenth

maneuver) field

soil.'^

and more susceptible

to stand for industry

primary

spread and worked into the

to

winds and breezes, dust

has often been associated with motion and commotion.

made

or excre-

its

(itself originally identical to

took on the meaning of dung that did dirt take on the meaning of

Only

to a prehis-

dreet,

ment."^ Accordingly, in the thirteenth century dirt kept association with smelly and unclean matter.

The word

and progress, whereas

It

has even been

dirt frequently is

taken to belong to the land and thus to evoke the essence of a place.

For

this reason, dirt

can be transformed into grounds for nostalgia.

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

It

ALL

/

»3

can be

made

the people this

to

who

evoke the

soil, its

touch and smell, and by extension

invested themselves in a given plot of earth. Dirt, in

metaphorical succession, also represents the old ways: hence the

expression "a stick-in-the-mud."

As

can be emotionally expanded in meaning to represent

dirt

so dust can be contracted in

its

meaning

and desiccated, divested of animation, associated with the dead leaves

of the wind

and

sterility

and

dirt's fertility

itself.

to

connote only what

antithetical to

blown by

the

wind or the emptiness

This contrast between dust's

sterility

has served literature in the past two centuries by

characterizing types of people. There are dry-as-dust scholars

mic, weightless representatives of a bookish sort of are dirty

dry

can be

It

life.

is

life,

men and women,

a vital breed of

mind

—

—and

humans who

live

ane-

there

on the

land and, in sharp contrast to "the calculating bourgeoisie," are authentic in spirit

and

action.

Romantics since Rousseau have prescribed

a return to the countryside, to the land, to the very earth

at the crossroads to start

As much

as dust

and

intellectual

and murderer,

on the true path dirt

earth as their mother. Both

might be

as a

Crime and Punishment, Dosto-

spiritual cure for their disaffection. In

yevsky has Raskolnikov, the

itself,

kiss the

to forgiveness.

differentiated, they

were dark and

ground

inferior.

still

Both were

shared

identified

with decay and death. Both belonged to the realm of the insignificandy small.

The

residue of discarded

life,

dust and dirt were trod underfoot

and swept out, except by the most superstitious. Even Christ instructed his disciples to

shake from their sandals the dust from a house in which

they were poorly treated.

And

yet Christ mixed dirt with saliva to heal

the blind.

24

/

V/HEN DUST WAS THE

COMPANION OF ALL

DEFINED BY DUST! THE MEDIEVAL PEASANT Probably since the beginning of agriculture

— whose — and

origins lay in the

Near East eight thousand years before Christ

court

have labeled peasants as coarse, stinky, and worse.'"

wicked witch had asked of

all

history

who was

sally identified

Snow White's

the dirtiest of

"The

her mirror would undoubtedly have answered,

was on more intimate terms with dust and

If

city dwellers

dirt.

them

peasant."

No

all,

one

Peasants were univer-

with the color of the earth they worked, as inferior,

dark-skinned people. At the root of their inferiority was their proximity to dust

and

dirt.

Medieval European peasants lived mired dieval city, according to Lucien Febvre,

The sunken road street

widened

filthy

stream ran

as

it

down

chins, ducks, chickens,

its

center, fed

all

by

me-

mud:

in

It

rivulets of liquid

was

a

wallowed

muddy

in spite

A

manure

slough in the

of the sun,

in the heat

and dogs, even pigs

Dust ruled peasants' homes

room

wallowed

the

followed a capricious route through the town.

of choking dust

to control them,

muck." Even

leading to the gate was muddy. Past the gate the

seeping from nearby manure heaps. rain, a desert

in

in

which ur-

of repeated edicts

together.^"

as well.

The

kitchen, the

most important

filled

households

with dust, soot, and smoke. ^' Historian Jerome Blum offers

this portrait

house because

in the

it

contained

fire

and food,

of the dwellings that housed the great majority of Europe's peasants

from the early Middle Ages Most peasants unhealthy.

to the mid-nineteenth century:

lived in huts that

Many had

were small, low, uncomfortable, and

only one room, or one room used as living

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

/

a$

quarters and a second

Not

room

infrequently the floor

that served for storage or as a stable.

was

dirt.

crude furniture that included a

The

table,

hut held a few pieces of

benches along the wall, a shelf

or two and perhaps a cupboard, and, especially in eastern Europe, a large stove that took

up much space

crowded room.

in the

.

.

.

Fre-

quently there was no chimney, and the walls were blackened by

smoke

The

that could escape only

small

windows

through a hole poked in the roof wall.

let in little light,

so the hut's interior

was dark,

damp and gloomy."

The poorest

peasants were even worse

off, living in filthy

hovels

and caves. Their beds were rubbish heaps. They were married

to the

rags they wore, the dirt that covered their bodies, and the smells of their bodily wastes.

As

the Italian historian Piero Camporesi explains, peasants

infested

by vermin and enveloped by

[They were]

dirty,

disease.

almost always barefooted, legs ulcerated, varicose

and scarred, badly protected by meager and monotonous in

were

humid and badly

diets, living

ventilated hovels, in continuous, promiscuous

contact with pigs and goats, obstinate in their beliefs, with

dung

heaps beneath their windows, their clothes coarse, inadequate and rarely washed, parasites spread

hair and in their beds

attacked

from the demic

by

—

—on

their skin, in their

their crockery scarce or nonexistent, often

boils, herpes,

flesh

everywhere

eczema, scabies, pustules, food poisoning

of diseased animals, malignant fevers, pneumonia, epi-

flues, malarial fevers

.

.

.

lethal diarrhea (not to

mention the

great epidemics, the diseases of vitamin deficiency like scurvy and

26

/

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION

OF ALL

pellagra, the convulsive

fits,

so frequent in the past, epilepsy, suicidal

manias and endemic cretinism)."

Peasants did not doubt that they were

kingdom.-^ Mites,

and

sting

grounds.

bite,

A

and

all

ticks, fleas,

and mosquitoes

made human beings

their

each had their

food and spawning

community with small and hurting

peasants are poor earthworms;

we

live

things

when he

said,

with the animals, eat with

them, talk to them, and smell like them. Therefore, like

—

the biological

southern Italian peasant of the twentieth century declared

the peasant's

"We

lice,

members of

we

are a great deal

them.""

Human Historian diseases

skin

was vulnerable

Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie

were

among

rife

scabies, leprosy, St.

peasants.

made

and the creatures

it

nurtured.

said that sixteenth-century skin

They

Anthony's Fire and

ant insults and curses ulcers

to dust

included "the St. Martial's

itch,

Fire."

ringworm,

Even peas-

reference to "scrofula, fistulas of the thigh,

and abscesses." "Villagers carried around with them

fauna of fleas and

lice.

and relations from

all

Not only did they

her mother.)"''^

Although

one another.

lover, the servant her master, the daughter

The thumb was

their

whole

scratch themselves, but friends

levels in the social scale deloused

(The mistress deloused her

a

called the louse-killer (tue-poux).

macrocosm reached

to the stars, peasants' lives

and

hopes revolved around small things. Not unlike contemporary people, they held on to scraps and remains to preserve the essence of belongings

and loved ones. Medieval people often preserved fingernail clippings and locks of hair from the head of a deceased family patriarch

in

hopes

of preserving the domus 's good fortune."

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

/

27

The human flea, after Robert

The balance of literally

measured

Hooke

the peasant world teetered

by

life

it.

on tiny

grains. Peasants

Grain meant food for today and seed for

tomorrow. In good times, French peasants would respond to an inquiry about

how

they fared by saying, "J'ai du pain" (I've got bread). In

bad times, they looked and ate

rats

and

in the dust for things to eat.

Nothing was too small

insects.

They dug up

to

be considered as

food. According to the sixth-century bishop and historian

Gregory of

make bread out of

Tours, during famines people tried "to

roots

virtually

anything: grape pips, hazel tree flowers and even fern roots, and [their]

stomachs were grossly distended because they had

to eat field grass.

During famines, which stalked European peasants teenth century, the smallest things could ants

who

lost their place

sway

lives

"^*

until the nine-

and fortunes. Peas-

on the land became wanderers. They scav-

enged the countryside for food, sought refuge in the woods, and flocked to the cities, in

28

/

where they

lived under bridges, in piles of straw, or even

manure heaps. Beggars

^'HEU DUST WAS THE

in tattered rags

COMPANION OF ALL

were ever^^'here

—

at the

door, outside churches, in the marketplace that

— and

covered their decaying bodies.'' Hunger

they died hke the

real,

flies

hunger remembered,

and hunger feared drove peasants from youth to the grave and kept

them mired

making

in dust well into the eighteenth century,

for

life

Camporesi comments, "the antechamber of death."^

the majority, as

MIRED IN muck: ROYALTY AND ARISTOCRACY who were

Peasants were not the only medieval folk

everyday encounters with the small made them

itch

dirty

and whose

and scratch. Kings

and queens were also on intimate terms with vermin. Eugen Weber describes a

young French

"not to take

lice, fleas,

front of other people."

princess in 1700

who had

be instructed

to

and other vermin by the neck to

The

just so

when running

water was scarce and baths rare, kings and queens stank.

"The

to

brew

special

smell of

in

bored with them that

they "affected to train and feed pet fleas." In an age

notorious:

them

French and Spanish courts

ladies of the

were so familiar with vermin and perhaps

kill

Henry IV was so

Some were

ferocious that his wife had

perfumes to stand him, and Louis XIII [Henry's son]

prided himself on taking after his father.""

Royalty commonly sucked aniseed lozenges to sweeten their breath,

made

by rotting

foul

teeth

and bad digestion. With noses guarded by

perfumed handkerchiefs, they picked streets.

tect

way through

manure-filled

But neither riding horseback nor a haughty attitude could pro-

them from splashing mud,

Ackerman fume

their

his

in spices.

rising vapors, or

points out that Louis

XIV

swarming

Diane

kept a stable of servants to per-

rooms with rose-water and marjoram and

"He

gnats.

insisted," she writes, "that a

to

wash

his clothes

new perfume be

invented

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

/

29

every day." At his "perfumed court," "servants used to drench doves in different scents

and release them

at

dinner parties to weave a tapestry

of aromas as they flew around the guests. "^^ Nevertheless, these birds could not mask the palace's stench for long, as the building's

many

small apartments were without running water.

While some royal personages were

celebrity stinkers, royalty

nobility alike attempted to separate themselves

from the

humanity by adopting manners. Manners, according

were In

way

a

Civility,

selves

for high society to distinguish itself

Erasmus taught the upper

classes

from the most incriminating of dirts,

To wipe

the nose

of pungent

Nobert

Elias,

from dust and

dirt."

manners

their

rest

and

to

to distance

them-

own bodily discharges.

on the cap or sleeve belongs

to rustics; to

wipe the

nose on the arm or elbow to pastry cooks; and to wipe the nose with the hand, if is

not

by chance

much more

at the

civil.

same

instant

you hold

to

it

your gown,

But to receive the excreta of the nose with a

handkerchief turning slightly away from noble people

is

an honest

thing.'"

The high and mighty had stuff that

to

be taught

all,

to react to the

came out of and resided on them. They had

disdain the picayune but to bring razor,

how

and toothbrush

civilization

—under

it

—with

reveal

to learn not to

the help of wig,

makeup,

the control of civilized manners. After

was largely about appearance, and appearance required

constant surveillance of the small stuff of the body.

may

lowly

how

far the

manners of Europe

A

traveled. In

single anecdote

A Canoe

Voyage

up the Minaysotor, the English traveler George Fatherstonaugh described a U.S. federal judge he

JO

/

met

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

Wisconsin Territory

in

ALL

in 1835:

The Court gether.

want

[title

for the judge]

He had been

for shrewdness,

and myself got along very well to-

bred to the law

in the

western country, did not

was good natured, but was evidently

low habits and manners. He was very much amused with tus for dressing,

new

to

him and he remarked

tion than a fork, too

which was simple enough;

much

which he

said he

dirt in their nails."

toothbrushes." the handle

He "once

that "it

He

was

my

man of appara-

was quite

a considerable better inven-

had seen people use when they had

"didn't see

carried one, but

was convenient

a nail-brush

a

it

why

I

wanted so many

was troublesome, though

to stir brandy-sling with.""

Travel in Europe in the eighteenth century offered similar experiences,

according to an English traveler, Arthur Young. Journeying through

France and Italy in 1790, he denounced a northern fill,

black, filthy, and stinking, and there are

improved

for

him

in

Italian inn: "Fright-

no window panes." Things

Turin and Milan but deteriorated again when he

boarded a decked boat from Venice to Bologna with

who

a skipper

"takes snuff, wipes his nose with his fingers, [and] cleans his knife with his

handkerchief

at the

same time he

is

preparing food for you.""*

URBAN FILTH AND DISEASE Besides lacking goods and means, European civilization until the twentieth

century lacked a sufficient number of toothbrush-carrying Fa-

therstonaughs to clean up society. Even city dwellers' lives were clean

only by comparison to the dingy lives of peasants. Overcrowding

filled

the cities and their dwellings to bursting point. Destitution, disease,

and vermin abounded. Without running water, sewage systems, paved

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

/

)i

were by today's stan-

roads, or street lighting, even the best of cities

London

dards rustic and foul. In

in the 1830s, the exiled

and impov-

erished Italian social thinker Giuseppe Mazzini, unable to afford a cab,

revealed his poverty by arriving at his appointments covered in mud.

"The

London

dirt in

streets appalled

him. So did the bedbugs, which

increased his nostalgia for Switzerland."^' "Improper drainage," wrote

Eugen Weber of European urban

life,

"was

a great source of infection.

Sewers and cesspits seeped into wells and cisterns." Some oceans and rivers in which to

"wallowed feet

in wastes,

.

.

of their citizens."^*

.

dump sewage and

the excrement of daily

Of

cities

garbage, but most

life

lapping round the

seventeenth-century London,

Gamni

gado observes, "Apart from Cheapside and Strand, London had no streets to

speak

of,

Salreal

only narrow tracks that in wet weather stank with

the slime of generations of

filth

and garbage, daily renewed by the

discharge from doors and windows. city

had

was anything done about the

Only when

piles

the plague ravaged the

of refuse that stood outside of

every front door."'' Until the middle of the eighteenth century, European society

ensconced in darkness and mired

were the exception. Dust,

dirt,

in

muck. The dainty and

human

beings were at

The worm to the earth.

literally

delicate

and muck multiplied and diminished

according to the seasons, seemingly more than

at

home with human

beings

home with them.

and metaphorically connected

They could not understand

men and women

their relationship to the earth

without reference to the work of the worm. Camporesi noted that

and

women

cretely

32

/

—

of the preindustrial age "lived

in a

was

—

metaphorically and con-

verminous universe, unimaginable

WHEN DVST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

men

today."''"

Popular ob-

Earthworm

sessions with

worms

times swelled into contagions of

at

the imagined wilderness of the body,

Not immune

worms were savage

fear.

beasts.

to this fear, physicians invented an invisible

that explained illness as the behavior

of unseen

worms

Within

microcosm

within the body.

They

postulated harmless

worms, "innocent guests," which could be-

come

infuriated,

bump up

against the intestinal walls, and cause death.

They claimed their

that sick

worms

defecated within the

human body and

excrement befouled human blood, causing cardialgia, hiccups,

stomach pains, headaches, convulsions, and

epilepsy.""

Worms, which along with snakes crawled medieval mortuary medical debates."^

art,

in

and out of skulls

in

penetrated both the popular consciousness and

They evoked

the horror of being

consumed and

digested in the darkness of the coffin. Besides stimulating confessions

and intensifying wishes for In The Cheese figured in the the stake

and

the

a heaven,

worms

served the era's science.

Worms Carlo Ginzburg

cosmos of

^

explains

a sixteenth-century miller

by the Roman

who was burned

Inquisition for heretical ideas.

Menocchio (whose name means

"little

how worms

The

at

miller,

eye"), drew an objectionable

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

/

5}

analogy:

"From

most perfect substance of the world

the

were produced by nature,

just as

and when they emerged received as

worms

are

neously generated out of chaos, the

Menocchio's view, heaven

itself

produced from a cheese,

will, intellect,

he blessed them." The miller argued that first

[the angels]

and memory from

God

God

himself was sponta-

"great and crude matter."''^ In

was consumed by

the subterrestrial

microcosm of worms. Menocchio was not alone

in

conjuring up dark images of invisible

enemies, even though a certain degree of orthodoxy could be main-

by contending

tained

the all-seeing eye of led the

God

and

bats. In the

they attacked

human

taught rats to

flee

fields. It

"A

flight

from dying

dark,

warm and damp

flesh

The

evil that

demons who

was the

had

festered

into legions of worms,

form of scourges and clouds of devil's cunning,

houses falling to ruin and

of a dying person.

worms

locusts,

people said, that

to escape the

quite certain sign and portent of [death]

body

was

the

of these slimy and very sticky inhabitants of the recesses of the body."'*''

The

small and the in-

always required explanation and proved to be an open medium

human

for

invisible

These demons transformed themselves

spiders,

visible

or the devil's machinations.

world astray was explained by

in feces. flies,

even worms inside the body could escape

that not

imagination.

The human beings of the

preindustrial

world could not escape, and

therefore could not think beyond, the boundaries of dust, darkness, and skin.

the

To

transcend these limitations would require a great cleanup of

human environment. Water and

light

would have

against earth and darkness. Clean, shiny goods

ated in vast quantities.

34

/

would have

Knowledge of the small and

WHEN DUST WAS THE COMPANION OF

ALL

to

be turned to

be cre-

the invisible

would

have to become the concern of a new breed of curious men and with

new

theories and machines. But

microcosm, along with

a

first

a fresh

brand new order of

ments, would have to be created. In the

late

women

and acute view of the

fine

goods and

instru-

Middle Ages and Renais-

sance, curious scientists and thinkers breached the frontiers of dust,

darkness, and skin as no other civilization in the West ever had.

WHEN DUST WAS THE COM PAS ION OF

ALL

/

}5

CHAPTER TWO

OLD METAPHORS

AND NEW MEASURES OF THE MICROCOSM Col tuo lume

(With your

me

light

levasti.

you

—Dante,

As

raised

me

up.)

Paradiso 1.74—75

ideas of refinement and, later, cleanliness took hold of

courts and the emerging urban business classes in

modern

European

modern and

early

were correspondingly considered dirty and

history, peasants

coarse. Indisputably, they

were the

closest

companions of

dust.

They

lacked the manners of the residents of city and court, and they sorely lacked delicate things.

Though

nature occasionally presented these peo-

ple of the earth with beautiful objects frost

on

— none of

a leaf

What was

36

a spider's

the things they

small in everyday peasant

proceeded downward: from cat and small

was what could be taken

from

a field, lifted

in one's

—

up

web, the etchings of

owned were life

refined.

started with the self

rat to spider, ant,

in one's

in the air, rolled

hands

—what

flea.

The

could be gleaned

between one's

mouth. The extremely tiny encompassed

and

and

all

fingers,

and put

the things that

could barely be seen: things that glimmered flickered like ash in a cooling

in

and out of sight or

fire.

Peasant's dwellings were dark and dusty. Their breads were coarse.

Centuries away from finely granulated sugars, their sweetener was

honey, which varied enormously in flavor and quality from one locale to another.'

Their homes were devoid of furniture, windows, or closets

and were unadorned with fancy cloth or woodwork. Peasants rarely sat in chairs

and never read books; they might never even see

They never looked window. They

at

themselves

rarely, if ever,

in a

a picture.

mirror or peered through a glass

handled coins, and they knew nothing of

precious gems.

They were, however, Gold cured

dazzled by gold, the antithesis of dirty dust.

diseases, especially

of the eye. Under gold's luminous and

spellbinding power, peasants, as medieval historians remarked, were occasionally caught up in digging crazes. that

which could turn

was

as

worthy

as

common

No

magic was greater than

earth into precious gold.

No

adventure

Columbus's search for a shortcut to the Orient and

gold and spices.

its

Peasant tools were as simple and coarse as their the

knowledge

— and even

the wish

—

drum

to beat on.

essary to create fine things. to record

is

common

small

is,

lacked

in a

common

—

often a

mere reed

lacked the instruments nec-

They were without

and they shared one of the most

What

They

minute objects. They lived

They

to shape fine belongings. If they

had musical instruments, they too were simple whistle or a hide

lives.

glasses to see or pencils

world without miniatures, prejudices of the old order:

with rare exceptions, insignificant, despicable, and

as dust.

In this rural world, small things

went unmeasured. Peasants lacked

OLD METAPHORS AND NEW MEASURES

/

J7

fine rulers

and

or calculation.

and they had no need for precise measurement

scales,

They had no gauges

to record pressure,

no meters

to

measure power, no detectors for smoke or gases, and no thermometers.

They had no means

for calculating

volume or speed or ascertaining

conversions between liquids, solids, and gases. Belonging to a rude and coarse world, overshadowed by dust and darkness, they had neither desire nor

knowledge

small remained, as field

it

had been seemingly forever, the sparrow

and the hairs on one's head.

computer chip

a

minute things. The scale of the

to manipulate

hundred times

No

in the

one spoke then of etching on a

finer than a

human

hair.

SCALES OF MEASURE Besides having no need to calculate precisely, medieval peoples lacked standardized measures to do so. Measurements varied immensely from

one locale

to another. Business

judged by

how

far a

man

far a

proceeded by estimates. Distances were

team of oxen could plow between

could walk in a day,

or, in

rests,

by how

Old French Canada, which more

than anywhere else in North America preserved the old regime, by the

number of bowls of tobacco destination. Lengths

thumb,

hair,

a

man

could smoke on his

were determined by the average

size

way of a

to his

human

or forearm, while quantities were subject to such widely

varying measures as baskets, barrels, casks, and cartloads.^ The few

common

standards were established by local authorities.

eling merchant knew, measures varied greatly

The most These

units

precise measures

As every trav-

between regions.

were used for the most precious

were derived from the

finest

common

things.

thing of the era: a

kernel of grain. Grain was a traditional denomination of Sicilian cur-

38

/

OLD METAPHORS AND NEW MEASURES

Edward

rency.

II ot'

England,

an effort

in

inch, formerly the thickness of a man's

modernization, defined an

at

thumb,

be "equal to three

to

Long

grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end lengthwise."'

before the Middle Ages, peoples of the Middle East measured the

weight of diamonds by carob beans

(qirat);

hence the carat became the

unit of weight for precious stones.

Things did not change

in the

remote from trade routes)

side

countryside (especially the countryuntil kings

and

their representatives

took hold of them. Then rulers insisted on defining

rules.

The French

Revolution brought the metric system to France and to the continental Europe, setting in place for

all

a standardized

rest

of

mathematical

grid for exploring, quantifying, systematizing and controlling the small in

everyday

society in

life.

Universal standards marked the triumph of a

which goods would be more equally and carefully

new

parti-

tioned.

The

farther cities progressed in wealth

precise they

Even as

became and

in cities,

and

specialization, the

more

the farther they left peasant villages behind.

however, the

of progress was comparatively slow

rate

long as their populations were tethered to agriculture. Great ma-

chines and delicate instruments remained scarce until the Industrial

Revolution.

FIRST EXPLANATIONS OF THE MICROCOSM The medieval understanding of smaller than the

and

tradition.

human being

The

first

—

the

microcosm

—

all

those things

derived from a mixture of experience

premises about the small were drawn from

Greek and Christian views of the macrocosm, the heavens, where the

OLD METAPHORS AND NEW MEASURES

/

59

sun, planets, and stars the

made

dominant authority of

manifest the glory of

intellectual life,

had

God/ The

little

church,

interest in

what

philosophers might speculate about the litde things of earth, as long as

God was

not denied as creator, Christ as savior, and

man

as

worthy of

salvation.^

In scholastic thought

—

the fusion of philosophy and theology that

characterized the highest reaches of medieval thought

elements were ible

fire,

gas, water,

orbs were composed of a

heavenly characteristics made

The new with

and

fifth it

earth.

The

—

the four earthly

planets, stars,

element called

celestial ether,

whose

the subtlest material in the universe.

science of physics that developed in the Middle

this view.

and invis-

Ages agreed

(Even early twentieth-century physics postulated ether

as a hypothetical

means

for the transmission of light

corruptible and immutable than the other elements and

and heat.) Less

more

ent to God's light, celestial ether had causative influences

transpar-

on

earth.^

Living things were argued to be superior to inanimate material because they contained the spark of life ("a

fly,

a flea,

and a plant are absolutely

nobler than the heavens"). Nevertheless, this belief did not deny heaven's influence over the earth and

all

its

creatures.

There was

a

general adherence to the Aristotelian notion that celestial bodies played a role in the generation of living things,

and

a

corresponding adoption

of a second notion that there were two kinds of living things: those

"born by means of seeds," which

scholastics called "perfect animals,"

and those "spontaneously generated from decaying matter,

number of mals."

insects,

as

were a

from within by secretions from the organs of

Thomas Aquinas argued

that,

ani-

while the perfect animals require

a seed {virtus particularis), the imperfect animal, testifying to heavenly

40

/

OLD METAPHORS AND NEW MEASURES

light's

power over dust and darkness,

power

{universalis virtus)

and

is

is

generated by the sun's universal

a direct

consequence ot the putrefaction

the sun induces.^ Satisfied

ens

—

with explaining lowly earth by means of the mighty heav-

the inferior

thinkers earthly

left

microcosm by the superior macrocosm

phenomena

as

how

plants

grow and reproduce

will,

who argued

humans

that,

did not have a

were the province of folk-

and mythology. There were exceptions,

scholastic

scholastic

the minuscule largely unobserved and unexplained. Such

role in philosophers' ethereal concerns; they lore

—

like

Adelard of Bath, a

though plants spring from dust by God's

growth

are not justified in simply pronouncing their

a

miracle and seeking no further understanding. Adelard contended that

nature had a system, and that only

when human knowledge

"fails

mis-

erably should there be recourse to God."^

The medieval

thinker's proclivity to treat

all

subjects rationally and

the importance of this in the formation of science should not be un-

derestimated; nor should ination of the microcosm.

we

underestimate reason's role in the exam-

The

first

scholastic explanations of the uni-

verse that took into account natural causes arose in the early twelfth

century

at the

school of Chartres. Inspired by Plato's

the Timaeus^ the

members of

this

book on

creation,

school depicted the world as com-

posed of interactive particles of the four elements: earth, water, fire.

the

air,

and

Lacking the sophistication of Democritus, the Greek atomist of fifth

century

B.C.

who

conceived of the action of indivisible atoms

governing the mutation of all

visible things, they nevertheless believed

the elements to be mutually transformable. In their conception, the

elements were arranged in concentric spheres with earth

in the center,

OLD METAPHORS ASD SEW MEASURES

/

41

water next, then in

and

air,

finally fire,

which the elements tended

forming

a finite spherical universe

to gather together in mass.'

This universe contained no void. Space was a plenum. Movement occurred by the small pushing on the small. Sensations resulted from the motion of particles in the body. Sight

was explained

emitting rays that were met

emitted by objects. Sound

was the motion of air

by

particles,

fire particles

ture

particles.

on the

the thirteenth century, speculators

had access

to a range of

The philosopher and

eye

without reference to the eardrum. Tastes

and odors also came from emitted

By

as the

invisible realms

Greek, Latin, and Arab

of na-

scientific texts.

'"

Magnus (Thomas Aquinas's

naturalist Albertus

mentor) offered keen observations on animals and plants and speculated

on

the formation of rocks

empirical

spirit, in

Frederick

II,

and mountains. Demonstrating an acutely

the thirteenth century the

Holy Roman Emperor

of Sicily, made remarkable observations on birds and their

anatomy, habitats, and behavior. Other thinkers, as

if to

peer into the

elements, reflected on invisible processes such as sound, vacuums, and

magnetism; others considered such natural phenomena as condensation, melting, and the spread of diseases.

The

last

they attributed to vapors,

an explanation that remained popular until the articulation of germ theory in the nineteenth century. origins of its

human sperm,

A handful

suggesting

origin to be any part of the body.

blood, arterial and venous. soul and the

first

its

of thinkers conjectured the

source to be excess food and

They

They pointed

distinguished two types of

to the heart as the seat of the

source of bodily heat, another invisible

phenomenon

they found worthy of reflection.

However,

42

/

it

was

in optics

and meteorology,

OLD METAPHORS AND NEW MEASURES

at that

time a single

subject, that thirteenth century thought shone."

moon,

the changing worlds of fire and air

were shooting

stars

were on

Between earth and display.

Above

there

and comets, the rays of the sun, and the comings

and goings of the weather. The appearances and causes of droughts, and storms

all

rain,

snow,

merited explanation. Medieval thinkers ques-

tioned rainbows, false suns, and light passing through air and water.

They considered such

subtle realities as transparency, refraction, illu-

mination, and magnification. Subjects that

demanded both observation

and geometry offered the privilege of working with ethereal part of

light, the

most

God's creation.

Admittedly, by twentieth-century measures, medieval natural science neglected the minute. Medieval thinkers constructed meaning out of

metaphor and analogy rather than by observation and enumeration.

With

their capacity for reason they posited the existence

mighty things on high; yet with Jesus lying in

humble

hay.

of great and

their faith they knelt before the

They pondered such

baby

intangible matters as

theology, morality, and humanity's journey toward God.'^ Exploration into the precise details of natural

erence,

which

classical physics

phenomena was blocked by

would

a pref-

sustain, for celestial matters

and

an Aristotelian teleology that defined things by

by an adherence

to

their place in the

cosmos rather than by observing

their actual func-

tions."

MUCH REMAINS HIDDEN Little in their

world pointed medieval minds or imaginations toward

the microcosm. Medieval technology and industry did not

tery of the small.

The most

demand mas-

curious scientists lacked instruments and

OLD METAPHORS AND SEW MEASURES

/

43

on the

institutions to focus their visions

particular.

Ignorance of atomic

and molecular theory kept the most advanced thinkers a vast range of natural

all

matter

as the basic unit of reality, as the building

—something

that science did not regain until the

end of the sixteenth century with the revival of the

—much

of Democritus and Lucretius conceived nor

gan

dark about

phenomena.

Without a theory of atoms blocks of

in the

classical

of the microcosm could be neither

Without microscopes, which

articulated.'''

to utilize in the sixteenth

atomism

scientists be-

and seventeenth centuries, much that was

minuscule simply went unobserved. Myriad realms and processes re-

mained concealed

low earth and

—covered by

skin.

Even when

dust, obscured bits

by darkness, buried be-

and pieces of the microcosm were

glimpsed, they were explained in reference to the existing cosmology

and folklore. Nevertheless, medieval and Renaissance thinkers did firm a fundamental element of

all scientific

the preeminence of reason and used

it

inquiry: they proclaimed

to explore

thus laying the conceptual foundation for

af-

and explain the world,

modern

science.'^

In the Renaissance, the philosophy of naturalism combined science

with poetry and used metaphor and allegory to describe nature's hidden

meaning. As Robert Lenoble suggests, nature became a ciphers to be divined

ogy was taken

by magic and

seriously.

set

the science of signatures."^ Astrol-

The heavens augured

the future; fate and

providence expressed themselves by means of shooting peopled fountains and the light of a

full

rivers,

/

to

stars.

Nymphs

to clean itself in

have the same "blood"

The world was considered conscious and

living, "like a vast animal,

44

and the sea was thought

moon. Trees were taken

that circulated in animals.

of signs and

warm and tempered by

OLD METAPHORS AND NEW MEASURES

the heavens."'^

Below the

eartli, in

the veins of

a Hfe spirit that nursed

gems, flowed

stones and allowed them to multiply. Individual stones were classified

bv

their

proximity to precious metals and, by the sixteenth-century

geologist John surface or

by

Kentman of Dresden, according

their

"marks on

to

resemblance to the sun, moon, or

stars,

their

or things

in

nature such as fruit."'*

Folk healers and herbalists also dabbled

in

and tinkered with the

world of the small. They mixed plant and animal oils

and fused knowledge with superstitions.

A

bits

with dusts and

few plied the secrets of

alchemy, a twelfth-century Arab import into the West, seeking to

change base materials into precious metals. With furnaces, laboratories,

and charts of

affinities,

they pursued a belief system not without sig-

nificance for the birth of to the

modern

modern

science and not without similarities

periodic table of the elements.

and number the smallest things and processes

Turning dust and

dirt into silver

til

in popularity until science

nineteenth-century chemistry

ics"

—began

to pick apart the earth,

a

it

and

compound by compound, molecule

it

"gave way

and

curiosities to facts,

wonder

and

state discipline."^'

Even

light,

to transform the

Alchemy's language of

promise of ennobling metals were consigned

the dustbin of history, as

darkness into

Alchemy

new kind of "subterranean phys-

earth's smallest particles into useful things.^" its

spice. ''^

to public utility,

to reason,

if

to

into charlatanry, un-

by molecule, and found the reason and the means

natural creation and

weigh

in nature.

its salt

transformed

—

to

and gold made alchemy seem

Renaissance experimenters a science worth

grew

They intended

[its]

to

marvels

and fortune to human agency

night could not be turned into day,

or dust into gold, the

new alchemy

instructed

on

OLD METAPHORS AND NEW MEASURES

/

4j

an immense scale what the oldest mining taught: taking apart the earth chunk

However,

this

by chunk and

knowledge

money

selling

it

bit

could be

by

made

bit.

lay in the distant future. Until recent

times, only hermetic and magical processes

were believed

to bring

precious metals out of the earth and to transform dust and dirt into things that please and cure. Magic

when

delicate

and

fine things

scarce for everyone, and

—

seemed

the highest

entirely reasonable in an age

goods of civilization

when humans could only

—were

see indistinctly and

measure roughly and were incapable of discovering and controlling the treasures of heaven and earth.

Beyond mind, measure, and machine,

the goods of the earth belonged to ordinary dust and dirt, and to the invisible entities within and

chemistry would

edge and

46

/

make

beyond them. Only

the world over in the image of

desires.

OLD METAPHORS AND NEW MEASURES

a truly

all

mighty

human knowl-

CHAPTER THREE

EARLYDISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE Because is

we

see these [beautiful] things

owing

"V-^ ~^

to

our eyes the soul

content to stay imprisoned in the body; for through the eyes

all

various things of nature are represented to the soul.

—Leonardo da I

see nothing but infinities

on

all

Vinci, Notebooks

which surround me

sides

as an

atom, and as a shadow which endures only for an instant and

—

more.

A

European peasant's eyes would have opened wide the

entered a thriving medieval

city.

In

its

is

no

Blaise Pascal, Pense'es

first

time he

churches and palaces, he would

have seen ivory panels on imperial diptychs and the delicate designs of illuminated gospels decorated with

He would have been ing,

silver, gilt,

enamel, and gems.

stunned by golden mosaics and the intricate carv-

embossing, enameling, and inlaying that had begun to appear on

such treasured items as the crown of Conrad

doors of the great medieval churches of In the churches the peasant

and confessionals.

niques were

more

1027 and the bronze

Germany and

Italy.'

would have encountered

ments woven with shiny metal threads and pulpits,

in

He would have

colorful vest-

intricately carved altars,

seen frescoes whose tech-

precise, colors richer, lines subtler than anything he

47

had ever imagined.

He would have been overwhelmed by both

the

In these works of art

life

representation and the miniaturization of

was depicted

as free of the dust

ular contours of his

In the cathedral

own

—

daily

and

life.

dirt that

shaped the painful, gran-

life.

especially if

it

were a

Romanesque

later

—he would have

or, in

Italy,

one of the rare Gothic churches

light

shows. With enlarged windows of decorated glass, natural light

(not the

shadowy

light

seen the great

of candle and torch) streamed

bodied order and value. The antithesis of darkness,

was the purest extension of God's grace and stood for God's invisible wisdom,

warm

in.

dirt,

Light em-

and dust,

it

his first creation. Light

mercy, and pure love.^ Free

of noise and squalor, the church suggested the illuminated beauty and order of an everlasting, but as yet invisible, kingdom. In every the church stood in contrast to the earthy the dark, stinking pits of hell sleep.

life

the peasant

where resided "the

worm

way

knew and

that does not

"^

Dante's Paradiso shared the ideal that informed the churches, aspiring to the love and light of God's abode.

stairway to the celestial creator

Synonyms

for light

form

a

candore, facella, favilla, fiamma, fiore,

folgore, fuoco, lucerna, lumera, raggio, scintilla, sole, splendore, stella.

Light, Beatrice instructs Dante, "is an expression of God's Being. light

.

.

.

has

its

partake of this

origin in light."*

God," and

Dante

travels

the heavens and

upward from

all

Every

things below

the world of strife

and anger, the things that prick and bind earthly humans, believing he follows the light that ascends to the love that sustains

48

/

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

all.

TOUCHING THE SMALL: FINE TOOLS AND CRAFTS In guilds and artisans' shops, the peasant

on larger but

still

would have seen men

sublime objects. Coin engraving

at

work

in the thirteenth

century and the manufacture of dies in the fourteenth century reflected

Western

civilization's

improvements

cally,

growing capacity

in the

to

manipulate metals. Ironi-

making of swords and armor advanced

si-

multaneously with the perfection of firearms and of the deadly dust

gunpowder. little

Illustrating that

even then

civilization relied

objects, medieval artisans learned to

such as needles,

drill bits,

and braces.

manufacture

a

on control of range of tools

If these tools did not give artisans

control of a particulate like dust, they at least offered an ability to

command The

little

things.

capacity to

make

intricate things

went hand

in

hand with keener

measuring. Anticipating twentieth-century science, medieval astrono-

mers chose accuracy of measurement over theories of physics and metaphysics. Mariners and instrument

makers concerned themselves with

matters in which a single degree could

They used ademic

make an enormous

difference.

empirical measures and achieved accuracies that

scientists

Metallurgists,

seem long on words and circuitous

attempting to

made

in their

produce alloys of consistent

ac-

ways.

quality,

learned to measure the density of metals. Assayers, seeking to value coins and jewelry, learned to weigh to a precision of about o.i milli-

gram.' Fine things and fine measures were things a fine civilization

could not have enough

As

of.

the civilization advanced in measuring and calibrating tangible

things,

it

also

moved forward

in calculating so intangible a thing as

EARLY DISCERSM EST OF THE MINUTE

/

49

time.

Nothing

testified as

as the mechanical clock.

would

much

The

to the era's skills with gears

large clock

on the cathedral or the palace

surely have caught the peasant's interest with

tomated movement,

its

and levers

bright colors, and

its

its

seemingly au-

parade of figures that

measured the passing hours. This accurate portrayer of untouchable time, with

its

intricately

meshed

gears,

was

queen of

also the

the

all

mills that, starting in the third quarter of the twelfth century, collec-

tively

drove Western

civilization's

commerce forward. Prominently

placed on the face of the city's most important buildings, the clock

evinced the age's impulse to quantify and command. Henri de Vick's

mechanical clock, which divided the day into twenty-four equal hours,

"was

set

ordered

up on the

all

Palais

Royal

in Paris in 1370.

King Charles

V

churches in Paris to ring the hours and quarters according

to de Vick's clock."^

Lewis Mumford judged the clock

engine of the modern industrial age tomatic machine."^

It

.

.

.

to

be "the key

prophetically the accurate au-

foreshadowed an age when great machines would

dominate the small and make new kinds of dusts. In the workshops of a large fifteenth-century Italian

would have encountered

artisans

city,

the peasant

taming the small with carpentry, leath-

erwork, weaving, and cloth making (the fourteenth-century flax crusher).*

A

latter

supported by the

commentator

in 1462

new

numbered

"beautiful Florence's" crafts:

[It]

has 66 spice shops and 84 workshops

ers, intarsia

carvers,

and

[that]

belong to woodwork-

[wood, metal, and ivory inlaying] designers and it

has 54 workshops specializing in the carving of stone,

both marble and sandstone; and there are masters with great

50

/

wood

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

skill in

carving and

relief

and inside the ers

city

and workers

wax images

and .

.

in halt relict

and toliage work both outside

and there are also }o workshops for goldbeat-

.

and there are inspired masters of

in silver thread

equal to others throughout the world

.

.

.

and there are

44 workshops of goldsmiths and silver workers and jewelers

in the

city.'

Certain crafts reached

new

levels of perfection in Renaissance Flor-

One was metalwork, which was

ence.

spectacularly

Duomo and

great metal doors of Brunelleschi's

on display

in the

in Donatello's sculpture

of David. Printing, which developed in the fifteenth century under

Gutenberg and aturization.

his followers,

With

scripts, printing

growing Western

was another

responded to the increased demand for books by a

literate laity.

Books

—which

civilization's experience

thin pages, invisible worlds

had

—

their

own

to preserve writer

books

—

A book invited

— were

the richest

composed of rows of

human

letters

and

were imagined. Even though books propromised

—

as

no other earthly thing

and reader from death. Produced

at the best prices in

great and miniature

even the

over the ages would so change

of the world

distinct dust, they

edented quantities and cities,

of refinement and mini-

the perfection of type design and the use of artificial

miniature. In their minuscule spaces,

duced

art

dirtiest

in

unprec-

Venice and other Italian

—were windows on unseen

worlds.

reader into shimmering palaces to meet

the fairest princesses. If

our peasant had visited Venice, he would have encountered a third

craft that

opened the door

to the small: glassmaking.

the fifteenth century, Venice's

By

the middle of

most sophisticated glassmakers were

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

/

51

making

the

first

pure white glass,

medieval colored or tinted

an improvement over

cristallo,

Anticipating a bright and shiny

glass.'"

world four centuries hence, glassmakers admitted and

and dreary world. Better lighting allowed more small

into a dark

things to be seen. Venice successfully guarded until the late seventeenth century,

would adorn

glass that

reflected light

when

its

glassmaking secrets

the French produced the plate

the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles for Louis

XIV, the "Sun King."

By

the end of the fifteenth century, Venetian glassmakers

ing mirrors, which seductively offered to

own image and do what

let

were

craft-

onlookers gaze on their

they would to improve

it

for the eyes of the

world. "Along with the development of the large looking glass during

hand mirrors and pocket mir-

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

rors reached the height of popularity. Pocket mirrors

part of dress, as

shown

— rooms —

those days."" Mirrors orating one's

new

first

reflected a

image

—

a

new concern with by

a

and

later for dec-

individuality.

growing wish

This

for a cleaner,

world truly distant from dirty peasants,

reflected

essential

of the [mirror-holding] beauties of

for looking at oneself

perspective was accompanied

brighter world their

in portraits

were an

who saw

back to them only in pools.

Eyeglasses developed along with mirrors and books. Their lenses offered a

means of perceiving

origin

uncertain (generally located

1300),

on

is

it is

clear that

in cities,

/

who were

sixteenth century Europeans

and

Henry

and glassmakers

up prosperous shops while

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

their

were putting

to read. In 1582,

statutes to regulate the mirror-

setting

Though

somewhere near Pisa around

glasses to look closely at small things

IV of France passed

52

by the

tiny and distant things.

their

poorer

hawk

counteqDarts traveled by foot out to villages to a description

I

glasses, chanting

of their wares:

have spectacles for the

old.

Monocles which do miracles, Glasses for snakes and peacocks. I

have them for

all

usage.

To

put on the big noses of the wise,

To

correct the sight of fools.

Render clairvoyant the

jealous.'^

ARTISTS PIERCE THE DARKNESS If

our peasant wanted to see the most delicate work of

have done well to look into an century, the best artists

They were

light's

most

artist's studio.

By

all,

he would

the end of the fifteenth

were the observers and engineers of the age. faithful servants, piercing the darkness,

ing dust, and grasping essential but intangible forms.

remov-

More than

all

other craftsmen, artists were expected to observe and render the

world. '^

A

product of urban Italian society, their achievement was a

rational control of materials in their painting, sculpture,

Experimentation accompanied their ical

art.

and

music.'''

They considered such empir-

matters as the qualities of paints, the precise characteristics of metals,

and the

details

of chasing, embossing, gilding, and inlaying.

Artists' studios

were the laboratories of the precise and

painters' renderings stood unrivaled until the in the nineteenth century.

keenest of

human

By

observers.'^

advent of photography

the fifteenth century, artists

They

perfected

delicate;

were the

ways of looking

at the

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

/

5)

world and representing their

it.

They

did

crowded shops and studios and

all

they could to

fall

on

let light

their canvases.

enter

Leonardo

distinguished between lighting in the shop of the painter and that of

He

the sculptor.

specifically

mentioned the

from the north when drawing from

human body, and

of having

and

dirt,

showed

represented animals, plants, and

the contours cities.

sought a person's inner character in the mirror of the face

of an eye, the curl of a

lip.

To

light

nature.'^

Artists idealized nature as free of dust

of the

desirability

—

They

the glint

depict nature accurately, they perfected

the representation of volume, mastered perspective and foreshortening,

extended their range of colors, and developed the use of tints and hues.

These

skills

made them masters of the microcosm.

In their quest to

contradicted those

who

Grosseteste,

had explored first

compose beauty out of what

who went

the eye sees, they

before them. Earlier thinkers like Robert

anticipated Descartes's and

light as the first corporeal

Newton's work on

optics,

form of material things and the

principle of motion and efficient causation.''

With

their bold reach,

Gothic architects staged light as the manifestation of God's wisdom, grace, and being. In contrast. Renaissance artists rendered light as seen in the

world and the world

artists like

as seen

by

Sixteenth-century Italian

light.

Correggio, Titian, and Raphael displayed their mastery of

light, painting their subjects in

dark rooms

or gathered around campfires at night. darkness, the incandescence of

fires,

by candles and

lit

They

depicted the

fireplaces

penumbra of

faint

glow of a com-

which

in turn requires

and the cool,

ing dawn.'* Civilization depends

mastery of

light.

on control of the

The eye must

small,

see before the

hand can draw. Objects

must be brought out from behind dust and darkness before they can

54

/

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

Descartes's theory

ofperception, i6yy,

shows the nerve impulse traveling from the eye to the pineal

gland and on

to

the muscles

be rendered beautiful.

On

this count,

Renaissance

step into the

world of small things. Indeed, the

and keenest

naturalist, a required

artists

artist

member of every

ing was an art that every scientist tried to master."

took a great

was Europe's

expedition.

The

artist

first

Draw-

assembled

an interesting world of small things, detailing the neighborhood of dust

and

dirt.

THE MASTER EYE In observation and illustration

and inventor (a villager

—was

Leonardo da Vinci

the master eye of master eyes.^"

—

artist,

engineer,

It is fitting

that he

with only a few years of education) began his apprenticeship

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

/

55

painting angels' wings. His creations, true heirs of Botticelli's slender,

were suffused with

fair-skinned, golden-haired cherubs,

No

grace.

theme seemed too subtle

for

Leonardo

intangibles of beauty, goodness, and vice, the

airiness

to capture

—

and

not the

movements of whirl-

winds, the body of a descending bird, or the distortions of weight and

human

aging on the

body.

As Leonardo constructed explore below the seas and

perfect lathes and designed machines to

the skies, he also penetrated the

fly into

screen of skin in order to understand the inner workings of animal and

human

bodies. Based

his anatomical

on dissections of more than

still

of the

Human Body

used in European medical schools hundreds of years

According

to

parts of the

bodies,

drawings were so exact that they, along with those of

Vesalius's classic of anatomy. The Fabric

were

human

thirty

George Sarton, "Anatomical drawings of the

body

are extremely difficult,

(1543), later.^'

soft internal

and some of them made by

Leonardo more than 450 years ago have never been equaled. Photographs,

however good, cannot always replace them."^^

Leonardo advanced the

which had already

sight of medieval science,

described plagues, dissected bodies, and performed surgery." With the tools of neither

anatomy nor physiology

available

and with medicine

subservient to convention rather than open to observation, the inner

world of living things persisted sisted

on exploring

tion, dissection,

it.^''

"Make

—

examine and explain. In

the rule and give the

/

filled

a section

with exhor-

on anatomy, he

measurement of each muscle, and

give the reasons of all their functions, and in which

56

yet Leonardo in-

sought nature's inner secrets by investiga-

and observation. His Notebooks are

tations to himself to

wrote,

He

hidden realm

as a

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

way

they

work and

what makes them work &c." parative that

In a section entitled

Anatomy," he wrote of "the

consume winged

flight

"Zoology and Com-

of the 4th kind of butterflies

ants." Elsewhere he instructed himself to "pro-

cure the placenta of a calf" and "describe the tongue of the woodpecker

and the jaw of a crocodile." In

"The

mals," he wrote,

and diminish of

dilate

eyes of

a section titled

all

much

greater;

the Eyes in Ani-

animals have their pupils adapted to

their accord in proportion to the greater or less

of the sun or other luminary

light

"Of

and particularly

[sic].

But

in birds the variation is

in nocturnal birds,

such as horned

owls."-^

After Leonardo and the Renaissance, medicine, especially surgery,

whose

practitioners

worked by

increasingly proceeded

precepts

came from

Throughout

empirically than doctors,

on observation rather than precept

— even

if

the

the mighty Hippocrates, Galen, or Avicenna.

if

grudgingly, to the detailed findings of the

anatomists, physiologists, and

was

more

the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, the learned

humanists gave way,

flesh

necessity

pierced, a

clinicians.'*^

When

new

the great screen of

few bold explorers entered a new

territory of the

small.

NEW INSTRUMENTS, NEW SCIENCE The

artist's

of scientists

monopoly over in the

the minute

was

first

challenged by a handful

seventeenth century. With telescope and microscope,

mathematics and experimentation, they discovered and sketched a new

microcosm. Aided by newly invented instruments,

scientists

discovered

and described realms that Leonardo could never have seen.

Even without

the aid of a microscope, Paracelsus (1493.-^-1541) had

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

/

57

articulated the kernel of a

new

medicine. Challenging Galen's

humor

theory of disease, he suggested that every disease had a precise origin

and a particular remedy. This proved to be a decisive idea in the de-

velopment of pharmacology, one of the emerging sciences of small still

without a microscope, but by keen observation and

incisive reasoning,

William Harvey (1578— 1657) opened a door to the

things." Later,

microcosm. Like the global explorers of the discovered country: the

human

and by extrapolation the

rest

body.^*

seas,

he explored an un-

Harvey showed

that the heart,

of the body, functioned like a machine.

Foreshadowing an understanding of

cells as factories,

he deduced the

functioning of the circulatory system and declared the heart to be a great

pump. Harvey wrote: "[The

sun of our microcosm

just as

much

heart] deserves to

be styled

as the sun deserves to

.

.

.

the

be styled the

"^^ heart of the world.

In the

first

decade of the seventeenth century, Galileo scanned the

when he

heavens. His telescope added insult to injury

pointed out that

there were imperfections in the newly discovered and defiant heliocentric

galaxy: Jupiter had moons, there were spots

Milky

Way

sky gave

itself

rise to

was

on the

sun, and the

a collection of distinct stars. Distant dots in the

arguments about the very design of creation. Galileo

also pointed his telescope earthward

New instruments allowed

and peered into an

insect's eyes.

seventeenth-century scientists to penetrate

farther into the microcosm.^" Scientists

precise devices. In his classic

made

book On

the

radical use of a range of

Magnet

(1600), William

Gilbert used a seaman's compass to create a science out of the medieval

mysteries of lodestones and magnetism.

made

58

/

possible

by suction pumps

The

invention of the air pump,

that allowed miners to penetrate far-

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

ther

below the

earth's skin, served science in the

He undertook

(1627— 1691).

pens to things deprived of

sound die without

uum.

On

air,

hands of Robert Boyle

experiments on the question of what hapair.

whereas

He showed

that

life,

combustion, and

light continues to shine

the basis of additional

work on

through a vac-

the transformation of gases

Boyle advocated the "atomic explanation of matter: that

into liquids,

small matter consists of small, hard, indestructible particles that behave

with regularity."''

The most

imaginative students of science began to

concealed a miniature order as perfect as that

realize that the universe

of the heavens.

Other measuring devices such

dulum

clock, and

precision.'-

all

Dutch

and

new

levels of

invention can be attributed to Zach-

spectacle maker, in 1590, or to Galileo,

opened the door

his invention in 16 10,

truly small

thermometer, barometer, pen-

the microscope permitted

The microscope, whose

arias Janssen, a

announced

above

as the

to the

who

realm of the

seventeenth century, masters of the

invisible. In the

microscope passed beyond the boundary of dust into the suburbs of microscopic fore seen, scopists

life.

their lenses, legions

dubbed animalcula,

drew

and legs

Under

the external

in detail.

ate,

of living things never be-

reproduced, and died.

The micro-

anatomy of insects, capturing antennae,

They completed

the

mapping of Harvey's

eyes,

circulatory

system by actually observing the "minute and capillary channels" be-

tween the the fern,

arteries

and veins.

were teeming with

And

they showed that seedless plants, like

fertile dusts:

"such

is

the wonderful and

minutely fine dust inherent to the back of fronds of ferns."" Marcello Malpighi

(i 628-1

694), the

first

to use a

microscope to study

anatomy, depicted the capillary systems of humans. In an attempt to

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

/

59

find out

whether frogs originated from eggs or by spontaneous gen-

eration, Malpighi reconstructed the stages of a frog's embryological

growth.

He

dissected the silkworm, producing the

first

an invertebrate; pioneered insect anatomy; and offered of the germination of bean,

monograph on classic

and date palm. Nehemiah

laurel,

(1641— 1712) added sex to microcosmic

life.

He

precious dusts thighs."^"*

—

those most

body which bees gather and carry upon

"are the

The work of Jan Swammerdam (1637— 1680),

dissector and illustrator,

Grew

guessed that flowers are

the sexual organs of plants and observed that pollen grains

—

accounts

was

collected in his Bible

a

their

marvelous

of Nature, which

is

considered "the finest collection of microscopical observations ever

produced by one worker." In

his Bible

he depicted an anatomy of the

bee, the spore cases of ferns, and the developmental stages of gnats, dragonflies, and tadpoles.

Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632— 1723) was microscopists.

He used

the best lenses ever

the

most famous of the

made and

reserved the finest

of his microscopes for his eyes alone. Magnifying objects 270 times, an

accomplishment unrivaled for nearly two centuries afterward, he caught glimpses of bacteria and offered the

first

descriptions of red blood cells,

protozoa, and other unicellular organisms. scription of an insect's eyes

He

furnished a keen de-

and sketched the development of the

ant,

the spinning and poison apparatus of spiders, and the metamorphosis

of the

flea.

Leeuwenhoek

literally

brought into view for the

new kingdoms of life. Dust would never

first

time

again be so simple.

In one of the crucial steps in science's definition of the minuscule,

Robert Hooke (1635— 1703), investigating the structure of cork, discovered and defined

60

/

cells.

Hooke

explained the minute stinging apparatus

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

Swammerdam

's

mouth parts of a

honeybee, ca. i6y5

Leeuwenhoek's development of a flea. (°-) ^gg- (b) Eggshell after escape of

and (d) Stages ofpupa, Young complete insect, (f) Larva.

larva, (c) (e)

Hooke's microscope

of nettles and, further discriminating

among

growth of mosses and molds. He was the

the

zoon, a

tiny,

first

to depict the poly-

mollusk-like water animal forming branching colonies

resembling brownish moss or seaweed.

on

dust's associates, depicted

fish scales, the structure

He

also discerned the

markings

of the bee's stinger, and the "tongues," or

"radulae," of mollusks. Charles Singer judges the best of Hooke's

M/-

crographia to be "really wonderful," especially "his figures of a gnat

and

its

larva,

of the compound eyes of a

pictures of a flea and

a louse. "^^

fly,

This newly discovered microcosm

contained whole forests of plant and animal

62

/

and two perfectly gigantic

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

life.

VASTN E S S OF THE MICROCOSM The

classical microscopists

cosm below was equal

A

mathematician

in scale

who

liquids, the nature

proved Pascal's

intuition that the micro-

and complexity to the macrocosm above.

studied such intangibles as the equilibrium of

of the void, and the weight and pressure of

(sensing, as Torricelli had before him, that

we

Pascal (1623— 1662) wrote of his intuition: "Let infinity

of universes, each of which has

earth, in the

same proportion

its

him

firmament,

had, finding

still

air),

see therein an its

planets,

its

as in the visible world; in each earth,

animals, and in the last mites, in which he will find again first

of

live in a sea

air

in these others the

all

that the

same thing without end and

without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness.""^

The

Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729— 1799) was one of

Italian naturalist

those scientists attracted to microscopic worlds even though the era's

approbation was reserved for those

who

scanned the heavens. Spallan-

zani proved that the smallest living things have parents, just as Fran-

cesco Redi (1626— 1697) had

shown

putrefying meat are the larvae of belief of preceding ages

taneous generation."

and

He

his

a century before that the flies.

worms

Contradicting the dominant

own, Spallanzani argued against spon-

suggested that the minutest forms of

produce without the influence of heavenly ether or the inherent of surrounding earth or

air.

in

life re-

fertility

Spallanzani identified his discovery of the

mysterious world of microbes with Christopher Columbus's discovery

of the

New

At the

World.'«

time,

no one concurred

that Spallanzani's

work was

as great

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

/

6j

Mites between the scales of a flea

as

he thought

it

was. Prejudice

still

preferred ascents of the

mind

the sublimities of the heavens rather than descents into the unseen

below. Above,

God

resided, and, if not

God,

of tiny, teeming inhabitants of dust,

seemed

So

to

demean

air,

life

at least a great rationale

prevailed, lending glory and credence to science's mathematical

ping of the macrocosm. Better one deity

to

who made

clocks than

map-

swarms

and water. Even Jonathan Swift

the microscopists of the era

when he

wrote:

naturalists observe, a flea

Has smaller

fleas that

on him prey;

And

these have smaller

And

so proceed ad infinitum?'^

still

to bite 'em;

Despite such mockery, the microcosm would prove to be no laughing matter, especially within

it.

when

the causes and cures of disease

Microscopic pathfinders would populate the invisible with

colonies of multifarious organisms that were perhaps as

64

/

were found

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

numerous

as

the sprites and hobgoblins of old and the spirits of the celestial orbs

above.

STILL TRAPPED BY DUST

AND DARKNESS

For the great majority of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century people, minute things skin.

still

lay behind the boundaries of dust, darkness,

Seeing the invisible world close up was the privilege of a few.

Even those who wore

The

and

the

new

standard eyeglasses of our era

mounted over both

we

eyeglasses saw less than

— made of

precisely

eyes, held firm behind the ears

—

see today.

ground

lenses,

did not exist until

the end of the eighteenth century and were not mass-manufactured until the

middle of the nineteenth century. Monocles, lorgnettes, mag-

nifying glasses, pince-nez, bifocals, individual goggles, and telescopes

were the devices early modern Europe used

on

to read the small writing

a page, pick out an individual face at the opera, or scan the heavens.

Although lens grinding improved, many eyeglass lenses were colored and made of quartz or beryl (the German word for beryl,

means

glass).

Brille, also

Like wristwatches, eyeglasses before the nineteenth cen-

tury were individually

made and

works of art, with

often were

intricate

cases.''"

Surgery, which requires keen sight and fine tools, afforded a measure

of

civilization's precision.

twentieth century built

— on

with glass domes.

Surgery depended then

available daylight.

The

finest surgical

wood,

as

it

did until the

Operating theaters were

instruments were by twen-

tieth-century standards anything but precise. ornate, with handles of carved

—

Though

they were often

ivory, or tortoiseshell, they

were

not uniformly calibrated until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

/

65

(Their original makers were armorers, the most skilled of medieval

and Renaissance metalworkers. Silversmiths took over

until specialized

instrument makers appeared in the eighteenth century.)

monly

rusted until the early twentieth century,

when

stainless steel

introduced.'" In sum, the finest instruments of the age for manipulating the delicately small

—

still

They com-

—

was

the best tools

wrench the nerves of the

contemporary observer when we imagine them entering the most sensitive places

of the

The absence of shortage of light,

human

body.

precise instruments, the lack of knowledge, and a

of which limited Europeans'

all

small, coalesced in a horrifying incident:

from surgery on from

his

ability to control the

Johann Sebastian Bach died

his strained eyes, a condition that purportedly resulted

copying of

control of the small

music.'*^

—

Surely there would have to be greater

a great cleanup of dust

and darkness

—

for West-

ern civilization to avert such tragedies. More light and knowledge, and less dust

garden

66

/

and darkness, were needed

men and women would have

EARLY DISCERNMENT OF THE MINUTE

to it.

make

this earth the pleasant

CHAPT E R FOUR

THE GREAT CLEANUP The fundamental

point

is

not the appearance of

new

ideas, but the

appearance of conditions that make such ideas relevant.

—Maurice Agulhon, quoted

in

Eugen Weber,

Peasants into Frenchmen

The is

story of Western society's rendezvous with the small and invisible

a multifaceted story.

about intellectual discovery and technolog-

control of the small and invisible.

ical

human

creations.

whose

limits in all

its

It is

It

It is

about increasingly minute

also concerns the majority's escape

from a world

preceding ages were dust, darkness, and disease, and

entrance into a world of unrivaled abundance and unprecedented

control of water and Hght.

The

story of pushing back the borders of the small

grew out of

Europe's spreading power, the advancement of knowledge, and the perfection of manufacturing techniques.

seen

—

to the refinement

of European

It

led

crafts

and

materials of the earth into intricate goods.

It

—

as

we have

already

their capacity to

shape

flowed out of Europe's

67

successful adaptation of the best Chinese and Arabic technologies.

converged with a sixteenth-century revolution

accompanied by a dramatic increase ture,

in trade

in population;

It

and production,

expanded agricul-

lumbering, and manufacturing; stunning advances in shipbuilding,

mining, and metallurgy; and Europe's global search for goods and markets.' In

all

directions

European

civilization

showed

itself intent

on

occupying and controlling more space and more things. Europe's exploration of the imagined horizons of the world merged

with a mounting intellectual curiosity about the particularities of

The

— —

Renaissance's "seemingly endless partitioning of the world"

"delight in particularization," to use Jonathan Sawday's phrases

vaded

social

by new

and

insights

intellectual life.^ It

life.

its

per-

was stimulated and made possible

and instruments. The telescope,

in

one direction, and

the microscope, in the other, looked toward the infinite.

Europe's descent into the microcosm progressed from the factors that underlay the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, in particular,

and the formation of the natural sciences,

in general.

These

factors

included scholastic rationalism's proclivity to argue about propositions as well as three as organic

the

cosmos

models of creation: the Aristotelian notion of creation

and purposeful; the magical and Neoplatonic conception of as

an enigma to be deciphered; and the emerging mechanical

and mathematical view of nature, which conceived of the world machine, a

set

as a

of functions and forces that could be calculated by num-

bers and formulated in terms of physical laws.^

Yet these factors did not materially ship with the small.

from the the

68

/

They

dust, darkness,

alter people's

did not rescue the vast majority of people

and disease that had held them since

Garden of Eden. They did not provide society

THE GREAT CLEANUP

everyday relation-

exile

at large the

from

means

or materials to manipulate the small for the

common

good. However,

the Industrial Revolution did.

The

Industrial Revolution

began

eighteenth century and spread to States,

and Canada by the

much of

transformed

decades of the

in Britain in the last

much of Western Europe,

the United

half of the nineteenth century.

first

the rest of the

world

production but also the minuscule things of everyday Industrial Revolution

fact that it

was

and

it

embodies

a paradox.

befouled and contaminated the earth's

work and

life.

Notwithstanding the water, and

soil,

also the engine for an unprecedented cleanup of

their societies. It permitted

has

in the twentieth century. It

has altered not only nature and nations and the worlds of

The

It

humans en masse

to

human

air,

beings

improve

their

dwellings and communities, freeing themselves from the old tyrannies

of dust,

dirt, parasites,

and disease.

It set

the stage for a

relationship with small and invisible things. Little things

and looked

different,

Revolution

trial

let

and they were

people for the

utilized in

first

was made

pliable to

felt,

smelled,

new ways. The

Indus-

time comprehend and control

The microcosm,

things they could neither see nor touch. before,

new human

as never

human dreams.

THE BEGINNINGS OF

A

TRANSFORMATION

Until the Industrial Revolution, humanity accepted the cyclical nature

of

life.

Nature's tides of composition and decomposition turned the

small into the big and the big back into the small. that

over time

itself

formed

all

beings would find their

a barrier

between the

visible

way

Common

to dust

sense held

and that dust

and the invisible that could

not be negotiated by the living.

Before the Industrial Revolution, dust held

real

and metaphorical

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

69

powers over human experience. Humanity lacked the science and technology to

differentiate

minuscule

entities. It also

illuminate these small things. Things

appeared, ever to

The

become uniformly

lacked the means to

were too universally

dull, so

bright.

experience of disease provides an important example of

human

fundamentally

even the most advanced

cities in the preindustrial

means of maintaining public

and sixteenth-century

Italian cities

Italy,

to

how

era lacked any ef-

Tracing the transfor-

hygiene.'*

mation from temporary health boards fifteenth-

how

conceptions of the small would change in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Carlo Cipolla has showed

fective

it

permanent magistracies

Cipolla has demonstrated

went from implementing stopgap measures against

in

how epi-

demics to establishing long-term policies of preventive action. These policies disappeared in succeeding centuries until revived

glish

and French

these

most advanced

at diseases that

in the early nineteenth century.^

They

fleas infected

did not grasp

how

with the blood of a sick

Enin

measures were aimed city officials

disease spread to

rat

the

However, even

might develop into plagues, whose origins

did not understand.

from

Italian cities, public health

by

humans

or a sick man, or

how

people infected by the plague could spread the disease by coughing or spitting out infected mucus.^

With no knowledge of microbes or centuries relied

contaminated smells,

disease vectors, people of earlier

on the uncontested theory of humors and miasmas of

air.

They mopped up

dirt

and dust because these led

which produced miasmas, which under

to

certain conditions could

develop into pestilence.' Even Edwin Chadwick's influential 1842 Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Brit-

70

/

THE GREAT CLEANUP

ain rested

on

this

equation of smell and disease. Besieged by

every quarter, Europe and the

rest

of the world lived

filth in

in constant fear

of plague. People believed that dirty conditions (privies draining into wells and open courtyards, and heaps of animal excrement) could pro-

duce the putrid In

air that

its earliest

ing for

human

caused the plague.

phases, the Industrial Revolution appeared to do noth-

To

health or cleanliness.

eye anxious for reform

in the city

the contrary, especially to the

and forgetful of conditions

in the

countryside, industry seemed to be creating a fouler and dustier world. Social critics, inspired

by Enlightenment

and smoke of the new industrial

city

Surveys of rural and urban Britain century illustrate if

of the

Cobden

new

live in

and living

mud

commotion

only dust and disease. in the first half

elites.

now shocked

In 1844 in the

of the nineteenth

the

awakened

sensibil-

House of Commons, Richard

—

mud

huts, with only

different ages

one room for sleeping and cooking

and sexes herding together. Their cottages

have no windows, but a hole through the

stop

in the

revealingly described the conditions of Welsh farm laborers:

They

and

saw

how conditions that had once been considered normal,

not universal and preordained,

ities

ideals,

light, into it

up.

floor

The

which

a

mud

bundle of rags or turf

thinly thatched roofs are

is

wall to admit the air thrust at night to

seldom drop-dry, and the

becomes consequently damp and wet, and

dirty almost as

the road; and to complete the wretched picture, huddled in a corner are the rags and straw of

The new

which beds are composed.*

industrial centers

a refrain, heard in Macbeth's

were depicted

"no pure

as dirty

and overcrowded,

air in the cities," that

had echoed

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

71

since the Middle Ages. City

air, critics

from the tyranny of dust. Rather, Ufe

demurred, did not free people

in the city

meant the

loss

and moral uprightness. One report noted Liverpool's down-

fresh

air,

ward

history. In 1790, 25 percent

of

its

population lived in cellars and

back houses; an 1840 survey of twenty-six fewer than 804 out of a

total

streets "revealed that

Judged

in the 1840s to

be "the most

unhealthy town in England," Liverpool suffered a high death duration for

figures for

life

was roughly 26

cities

in

Governed by

45."'

ordinances rather than by national laws for the

were engulfed

toll.

"The

years, whereas corresponding

London and Surrey were 37 and

the industrial cities

no

of 1,200 'front houses' were 'without

either yards, privy, or ash pit.'"

mean

of space,

first

local

half of the century,

"a putrid miasma." Because these

had no lawns or paved roads, rains turned them into quagmires

of muck.

The

industrial

some of the is

workplace was grim and

'dusty trades,' the excessive

so great as to justify interference."

wash

shops; forbade

them

to take

Chadwick wrote, "In

amount of premature mortality

He went on

to

recommend

whose laws demanded good

Paris Conseil de Salubrite,

required workers to

lethal.

their

the

ventilation;

hands before eating and leaving the

any meals

in the shops; required

"boarding

off the mills and sieves, so as to prevent the escape of smaller particles";

and required workmen engaged to "cover their nose

in processes that

and mouth with a

slightly

produced lead dusts moistened handker-

chief"'"

"The 'chimney-boys' of make one of

72

/

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

the saddest chapters in the history of inhumanity," ac-

THE GREAT CLEANUP

cording to Lawrence Wriglit. In 1S17, the British Select Committee heard the tragic story oi a boy stuck in a chimney:

"A

bricklayer

was

got and the chimney was broke into, where the boy was found, his

head surrounded on

sides

all

by

soot; he

was suffocated and dead.""

more dem-

Dirt ruled the early industrial order. At the same time, a

was trying

ocratic sensibility

who

Both writers

dust.

believed in reform and those

good old days depicted industry

the

was

become

to

donment of

It

its

ashes, not even a rents; the shutters its

longed for

Voicing what

as a befouling evil.

bemoaned

panegyric, John Ruskin

the aban-

unregarded havoc of ruin; the garden-gate

left in

loose to

before

who

the cottage of old:

had been

swung

common

a

head up and out of the

to get everyone's

latch; the

garden, blighted utterly into a

weed taking root

field

of

there; the roof torn into shapeless

hanging about the windows

gate, the stream

still

in rags

which had gladdened

it

of rotten wood;

now

soaking

slowly by, black as ebony and thick with curdling scum; the bank

above

it

trodden into unctuous, sooty slime:

tween

it

and the old

hills,

far in front

of

be-

it,

the furnaces of the city foaming forth per-

petual plague of sulphurous darkness.'^

Dickens offered one of countless descriptions of the dirty people of this

new

the old

order in The Old Curiosity Shop. Wandering homeless

man and

Nell are approached "by the form of a

erably clad and begrimed with smoke, which perhaps

with the natural color of his skin,

was."

He

offers

made him look

them refuge, indicating

a place

man

by

its

at night, .

.

.

mis-

contrast

paler than he really

where they "saw

a lurid

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

75

— glare hanging in the dark sky; the dull reflection of 'It's

not

far,'

man.

said the

'Shall

going to sleep upon cold bricks;

I

I

take

you

there.''

some

distant

fire.

Where you were

can give you a bed of warm ashes

nothing better.'"'^ Ashes were the bed of the poor, dust

still

their daily

companion.

PUBLIC HEALTH TAKES HOLD Some cities.

attempts were

made

to alleviate the squalor of the

new

industrial

Alert to the danger of miasmas, and vigilant about the accu-

mulation of waste, newly established public health organizations scrutinized the industrial order. Their officials tended to be

upper

which

classes,

identified disease with the

members of the

working

class

and the

excrement that poured from the slums. In the course of the century, Alain Corbin suggests, the upper classes became "the olfactory police

of

They were

society."''*

the conscience and sensibility of the great

cleanup.

But to

tell

the story of the great cleanup as that of a single class, or

even a single

era, ignores the continuity

of Western history. Public

water supply and sewage disposal had occupied the attention of Greek,

Roman, and medieval like

Urbino.'^

As

civilizations, as well as certain

Renaissance

cities

the Industrial Revolution progressed, Europeans

gained the tools to distance themselves even farther from dust. Cleanliness

became

a matter of

good manners. Wearing clean

shoes elevated a person. Escaping the

clothes and

muck and manure was

a

worth-

while goal."^ In the eighteenth century, civic authorities had

74

/

THE GREAT CLEANUP

begun

to regulate

water and waste and to enforce public health measures to prevent epidemics.

The middle

being comfortable

at

class

on both

home and

prove society were under way

sides of the Atlantic

in the coffeehouse.'^

in

many

sectors.

proving commerce, stimulating trades and

crafts,

was

intent

on

Attempts to im-

They involved imbuilding roads and

digging canals, consolidating laws, systematizing punishment, and re-

forming government. Taking

their

cue from the spreading

spirit

of

reform, eighteenth-century Utopian thinkers imagined a populace that

was educated, ordered, and something other than coarse and

stinking.'"

Reforms, both material and moral, spread throughout the nineteenth century as the

means

to control dust

and disease grew.

weights and measures continued to replace traditional ones;

superseded by roads, which gave

way

Official

trails

were

to the railroads. Political heroes

vied with priests and saints. Banking systems, public education, newspapers, and the military draft lined up

men and women and marched

them, body and soul, into the future. Nineteenth-century Europe transformed

its

peasants into national citizens."

Reformers had

most zealous,

a mission to purify society

meant attacking

this

on

dirt

and clean

all

fronts:

it

up.

For the

undoing

filthy

peasant ways; combating "the dark and bloody" legacy of the Middle

Ages; waging war against the unjust and arbitrary rule of tradition; and taking on, bit by

meant nothing the

bit, all

less

that

was

filthy

than whisking aside

way of humanity's

potential.

and corrupt. Attacking

all

dirt

impediments that stood

The Enlightenment

ideal, a

in

symbiosis

of moral and material good, directed humanity toward an entirely new order.

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

75

MORE BROOMS THAN YOU CAN SHAKE The

great cleanup

A

STICK AT

was not simply

a matter

of

ideals;

was

it

also a

matter of means. At the same time that the Industrial Revolution was creating unprecedented amounts and types of dust,

it

provided a host

of devices and agents to make the world spotless. Industrialists, if they did anything,

From min-

turned nature to dust.

ing to lumbering, steelmaking to printing, industrialists created dusts as they transformed the earth's materials.

With

steel

new

plows and

gasoline tractors, dredges and ditchers, they opened the earth to the

winds.

The production and consumption of

that age are recorded

by

dust accumulated in the depths of the sea, in the polar ice caps, and at the outer limits of the atmosphere. Paradoxically, as industrial society kicked up dust,

it

also

mounted

an arsenal of tools and chemicals for cleaning up bodies, homes, and cities.^"

It

mass-produced brooms, brushes, shovels, feather dusters,

scouring pads, soaps, and caustic sodas. to

fit

their purposes

Humans shaped

with the help of dynamite, cranes, road graders,

and bulldozers, which kicked up incredible amounts of

home, there appeared the (which in

its

the landscape

Bissell carpet

dirt.

sweeper and vacuum cleaner

early forms redistributed dust as efficiently as

up). For yards, lawns, and streets, there

For the

it

swept

it

were mowers and hoses. And

standing at the forefront of this arsenal was the almighty water pump,

which brought

in

water to remove dust,

dirt,

and waste

—and

also

removed stagnating or flooding water. The pump was already "a symbol of salvation in seventeenth-century England, for the answer to flooded mines but

it

/

THE GREAT CLEANUP

was not only

enabled water to be brought to the

towns and removed from potential agricultural

76

it

land."^'

A suction pump

in

a mine driven by

water, ca. i5Gi; future generations'

pumps would

later transform the

English landscape.

The mass manufacture of clothing enhanced fastidiousness." stores

Improvements

and homes of the

bits

in

personal cleanliness and

food processing and packaging freed

of food, blood,

flies,

and rancid smells that

evoked the slaughterhouse and the farm. In the 1890s, the Germans produced detergent, salts in

a soap

of molecules that did not combine with the

hard water and could be rinsed away, and shampoo, a soap that

removed grime and

oil

was washed away by

Once

from the hair with one type of molecule and

another.^'

introduced, the array of cleansers and cleaning agents, dyes

and paints grew with the spread of industrial first

society.

These were the

products of the modern chemical industry, whose growth accel-

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

77

erated from the i88os onward.^'* These products

made

manifest chem-

transform the raw materials of the earth into agents

istry's capacity to

and coloring the world. (They also reinforced the modern

for purifying

predilection to equate optimism with light and color and pessimism

with darkness and

dirt.)

Brand names became

society's vernacular language of cleaning as

innovative cleaning instruments and products redefined everyday

life.^^

A number of today's largest companies originated with everyday goods serving the great cleanup. In 1806, Colgate-Palmolive began concentrating exclusively ble, a candle

on

selling candles, soap,

and soap company founded

with the hiring of

its first

it

Samuel Curtis Johnson

son, a

nationally

New

that airborne

& Gam-

chemist and the subsequent creation (in part to the forefront of the soap

started selling

the parquet flooring he sold in his Racine

wax became

starch. Procter

in 1837, flourished in the 1870s

accidental) of a white soap that carried industry. In 1882

and

known

as Johnson's

wax

to care for

Hardware Company. The Wax. In 1886 another John-

England druggist, inspired by Joseph

Lister's discovery

germs were the source of infection, joined

his brother in

producing sanitized wound dressings. They started by making dicinal plaster but

ing.

soon produced a

Thus was born Johnson

that joins cleaning

and

his books. (This

sooner or

later.)

78

/

is,

absorbent cotton gauze dress-

young entrepreneur, David H,

customers preferred his promotional per-

perhaps, the discovery every author makes

What McConnell brewed

cessfully door-to-door ration.'^^

his

One morning

THE GREAT CLEANUP

me-

Johnson. In 1888, to take an example

beautification, a

McConnell, observed that

fumes to

&

soft,

a

became the in 1895

first

in his pantry

and sold suc-

products of the

Avon Corpo-

another ambitious traveling salesman.

Soap advertisement,

annoyed by

his dull straight razor,

posable razor. Six years

later,

ca.

1900

came up with

the idea of the dis-

with the help of an educated machinist,

he created the American Safety Razor Company, which eventually be-

came

the Gillette

This

list

Company.

of inventions suggests that the history of the great cleanup

does not rest solely with reformers and housewives.

It

turns on tech-

nology and business, whose protagonists, almost exclusively men, are associated with tool design, tion of the

new energy

sources (especially the perfec-

steam engine and the gasoline motor), metallurgy, and new

construction materials.

The

history of the

vacuum

cleaner

is

a part

of the story of the great

cleanup that recent feminist histories of cleaning have ignored. ^^ This history

amounts

to 150 years

and dust on pavement,

floor,

of male inventions aimed

and carpet.

It

at battling dirt

runs from giant, portable.

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

79

street

vacuum machines and clumsy

impossibly heavy

home vacuum

carpet sweepers with brushes, to

cleaners, to today's diversified host of

lightweight electric cleaners that suck up stones and water as well as dust. It involves forgotten

names

like

Booth and Booth (Englishmen),

Herricks (an American), McGaffey (the electric, straight-suction

man

vacuum),

first

Bissell (a

person to patent a non-

Grand Rapids, Michigan,

with an allergy to straw dust), Dufour (a

held an early patent on a primitive

vacuum

woman who,

cleaner),

in 1902,

and Spangler

(a

Canton, Ohio, janitor whose severe asthma drove him to invent an

vacuum

electric

Hoover, in

who

cleaner). Spangler visited his cousin, Mrs.

William H.

interested her engineering- and business-minded

husband

producing the machine. Hoover became president of the new vacuum

cleaner

company

in 1908, with Spangler as superintendent. This history

also includes inventions that should rightly be forgotten, like the "vac-

uum powered by that the

man

a bellows connected to a rocking chair.

The

idea

was

of the house could enjoy the evening paper rocking in

the chair while his wife performed the vacuuming."^*

WATER, LIGHT, AND OTHER ELEMENTS OF THE GREAT CLEANUP The

Industrial Revolution's contribution to the great cleanup can be

understood under

five rubrics:

new

goods;

new

materials; dirt- and

water-resistant surfaces; water control; and lighting.

The new goods took many

forms.

They ranged from

the plastic

toothbrush, floating soap, and shoe polishes to street cleaners and pack-

aged and frozen food. Frozen foods followed the triumph of the refrigerator

80

/

and freezer over the icebox

THE GREAT CLEANUP

in the 1930s

and 1940s. Along

with more packaged and canned loods, frozen foods meant cleaner stores

and homes, as kitchens, yards, and basements saw fewer rotting

vegetables, leaking barrels, and rusting cages, and less killing of animals.

However,

all

the

new packaging

generated wastes of another

kind, suggesting a law of the great cleanup: as dust and dirt are ban-

and garbage multiply.

ished, waste

Beginning with the mass production of cotton clothing, the Industrial

Revolution produced a parade of synthetic

fabrics, including

lon and rayon. These fabrics proved easier to care for than wool. clothing industry, which killed

its

ny-

The

share of animals for leather and fur,

colorfully dressed the masses in cheap clothes and shoes.

The mass

production of underclothing became highly profitable: in 1868, British manufacturers reported making a million pounds selling three million corsets.^'

Not

to be outdone,

ting the vast majority of ical

French manufacturers succeeded

women

industry not only created

in

new

in put-

France in underpants. The chemfabrics for clothes, bedding,

and

curtains but also produced blemish removers and dyes for them.

With new

materials chemists also created

smoother, more resistant to heat and surfaces steel,

were

less hospitable

aluminum, chrome,

to dust

less

new

surfaces.'" Brighter,

permeable to

and

dirt.

Concrete, cast iron,

oilcloth, rubber, plastic, Bakelite, vinyl,

Teflon formed the fresh, shiny, and colorful surfaces

Western urbanites began England

in

made

among which

and work." Linoleum (produced

floors easier to clean. Plaster

cheaper paints

cleaner,

to live

and

in

i860 and in the United States in 1925) and other synthetic

floor coverings walls;

liquids, these

more

provided smoother

and wallpaper covered cracks and created

colorful rooms. Eventually, even

basement walls made

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

8i

of fieldstone were replaced by brick, block, and poured concrete.

These new materials could be used grime accumulated cleaning.

less easily,

The housewares

which dust and

to create spaces in

and they also

revolution,

lent themselves to easier

which has transformed the

new

kitchen and the bathroom in this century, hinged on

and

materials

their shiny surfaces.^^

Floor coverings became

common. With

rugs,

which had been

people could make their dwellings comfortable and intimate

of place

we have come

of keeping the effect

dirt

to call

down on

home." (Doubtless,

—

scarce,

the sort

rugs' initial function

earthen floors did not produce the pristine

contemporary carpets do.) Then, around 1900, new

floor-

covering materials began competing with carpeting. Their promoters accused rugs of "corrupting the the finest and particles

air

by

retaining impure gasses, hiding

most penetrating dusts beneath them, while giving off

of fine wool in the atmosphere."

A

Pennsylvania interior dec-

orating and artistic wood-floor company, using what

would become

a

standard attack against carpeting, asserted that "the better grades of

unwholesome

carpet are mixed with cow's hairs, shoddy and other

materials," providing a possible haven for infectious "microbes and bacilli that float in the

To complement

atmosphere. "^^

these

new

surfaces, the chemical industry

developed

a range of new paints and protective coatings. In 1804, chemists created

white lead, an important pigment for paint that enabled industrial society to cover the cracks

was sold

in 181

5;

the

and edges of a rough world. The

first

ready-made paint was available

first

varnish

in 1867;

and

nitrocellulose quick-drying lacquer appeared in 1923. Quick-drying

phenols, paints, and lacquers

82

/

THE GREAT CLEANUP

made from new chemical

bases appeared

throughout the 1940s and 1950s, further helping humanity transform the surfaces of

One

its

world.

of the most important tools

ing arsenal was water, earth's plastics

enabled humanity to

water.

It

was conveyed

first

drill,

Revolution's clean-

in the Industrial

cleanser.

New

metals, rubbers, and

pump, and pipe

efficiently

across

great quantities of

immense

and

distances

through tight spaces. Unlike the irregular stone channels used since antiquity and the hollowed-out logs that in

1

72 1, cast iron,

large

formed London's water main

and cement pipes formed

steel,

volumes of water. Inside homes and business

and rubber and

The

plastic

hose proved excellent

technologies of

agent and a powerful

new

ideal conduits for

places, copper pipes

vessels for water.

modern plumbing turned water

ally.''^

into a docile

In city and countryside, water control went

hand-in-hand with control of the land. Drainage and irrigation leapfrogged their cities

in

way

across

modern

history.

Water made

fields fertile

and homes comfortable and hygienic. Discussing Victorian

and

cities

England, Asa Briggs remarked, "Perhaps their outstanding feature

was hidden from public view

—

their

hidden network of pipes and

drains and sewers, one of the biggest technical and social achievements

of the age, a sanitary 'system' more comprehensive than the transport system."^'^

tem It

to

David Pinckney judged

Paris's

Second Empire sewage sys-

be one of the engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century.

contributed to the decisive decline of waterborne disease in Paris

and allowed the Parisians of 1900 to say "Adieu bye,

muck

city), as

to the city he so

ville

de boue" (good-

Jean-Jacques Rousseau allegedly once bid farewell

admired and hated.

^^

In the United States, improvements in cleanliness and sanitation

THB GREAT CLEASUP

/

8j

depended on the

1

political

and regulatory changes.

York waited

until

840s for a wholesome supply of public water.^^ Such systems de-

pended on new technology, such Cast-iron pipes were

known

for

first

as giant

used for four hundred

great waterworks,

its

still

convey water. While hundreds of

feet

cast-iron pipes.''

of Philadelphia's

used hollowed tamarack logs to

had

cities

the 1870s, Joel Tarr indicates that few of

tems because

was believed

it

proved, or too

By

pumps and

in 1817; as late as the 1840s Detroit, a city eventually

waterworks

and

New

installed

waterworks by

them constructed sewer

that the technology

sys-

was unnecessary, un-

costly.''"

the end of the century, with running water available in schools

hospitals, dirt

and dust had

lost their

hold on society. Thanks to

the availability of public water, washing the great possibility, a practicality,

in her history

and a mission,

as

unwashed became

Marilyn Williams suggests

of the public bath in urban America.'" By 1950,

faucets and toilets

a

had entered the great majority of homes

in the

when West-

ern world, the most humble residents of this century had surpassed in salubrity and comfort the aristocrats of Versailles a

mere two centuries

before.''^

But before people could clean themselves and their world, they had to realize just

how

dirty they were.

They had

to perceive grit

grime and discern the source of foul odors. They needed important tool of the great cleanup.''^ century,

Now Pius

/

light, the fifth

the end of the eighteenth

street lighting a matter

of public

safety.

depicted as the most reactionary of nineteenth-century popes,

IX was

lights in

l4

Londoners considered

By

and

considered quite progressive

Rome

in 1846.

THE GREAT CLEANUP

when he

introduced street-

Light turned night into day

—and

with that

transformarion came the improvement of the Eternal City and the

promise ot reforming darkness shop, like

stroll,

and play

In lighted cities, people could

itself.

Criminals and unsavory elements,

after dark/"*

dust and dirt themselves, could no longer lurk in shadows. Ac-

cording to the French thinker G. Bachelard, administered

"we

live in the

age of

light."^''

Lighting opened roads, aided in navigating ships, provided beacons

and

traffic signals to

regulate civilization's

on cars and

the workday. Headlights appeared

which became widespread night's blackness

the single

flip

in the 1920s

— and banished

movements, and lengthened trains. Electrification,

and 1930s, spelled the end of

countless inhabitants of the dark.

With

of a switch the world of the past vanished.

Light enhanced the shine of the electric lighting did

Attics, basements,

away with

new goods and

surfaces.

Gas and

the soot of torches, candles, and

and closets no longer harbored darkness and

Gas stoves were lauded not only

for reducing the time

fires.

dirt.

and labor of

food preparation but also for freeing cooks from the frequent disposal

of ashes and cinders from coal and colors vividly. steel,

As

It

made new

stoves.""^

plastics

and enamels glow.

corresponding preference developed for bright interiors, trans-

parent glass

— now machine-made,

colored,

more homogeneous, non-

popular.^^ Glass

windows appeared

in

—became

the

more

more and more homes and

busi-

conductive, and highly resistant to weathering

nesses.

Light brought out

metals and alloys (especially chromium,

and aluminum) shine and a

wood

all

Countless photographs from the beginning of the twentieth

century depict a merchant and a small group of salespeople, dressed in their best, standing before shining glass cabinets in

what appear

to us

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

85

now

be dark and cluttered rooms. Glass doors in cabinets and

to

buildings and glass

world

to

windows

look in and out at

itself.

Glass (and later transparent plastic)

and showcases displayed the goods of an abundant so-

bottles, jars,

Cellophane too

ciety.

and cars permitted the

in stores, trains,

later

played

its

part in creating a see-through

world.

The

large-scale manufacture of standard eyeglasses

ingly of glass rather than quartz

—

in the

new

increas-

second half of the nineteenth

century equipped more people to see these bright lighted offices and the

—made

new

With

things.

age of physical and laboratory diagnosis,

medical doctors carefully examined minutiae in and from the body

and began

more

to

probe the body

precise instruments.''^

sion into medicine.^'

with standardized, sanitized, and

They introduced

a

Eye doctors looked deep

while surgeons threw as as they could.

itself

much

artificial light

on

new regime of into the

preci-

human

eye,

their patients' innards

Theater lights shone on actors and opera singers as

never before.

With

light at its service, nineteenth-century society could boast

about every clean

London, of the

new

surface.

The

Crystal Palace, built in

for the Great Exhibition of 185 1,

era's architectural progress. It

was

Hyde

Park,

the highest expression

was made of an amount of

equal to a third of England's total production in

1

840 and was a

glass

fitting

declaration of the confidence of a commercial civilization willing to say,

"Let light shine upon our wares."'°

The goods,

Industrial Revolution's creation of unprecedented quantities of

new

materials,

and washable surfaces further heated reformers'

passion for a world without blemish.

!6

/

THE GREAT CLEANUP

They were encouraged

to take

civilization's

pipe-dreams seriously. Bountifully cheap soap helped. By

one estimate, the use of soap increased fourfold

Deodorants and other

tury.^'

brought

civilization a

fruits

in the nineteenth cen-

of the pharmaceutical industry

whiff of the promised land.

Beauty, hygiene, and sanitation tended to converge. Each one played

an important role in making the great cleanup an interior imperative. Facts and conditions preceded imagination. But once stimulated, imagination, catapulted

forward by desire and

possibility, quickly outdis-

tanced reality: All could, should, and would be pure.

WELL ON THE WAY TO BEING CLEAN AND DECENT The

transformation did not proceed by wish alone

—nor was

it

where near complete by the end of the nineteenth century. In people were streets.

were

still

jammed

from universal. Conditions

abysmal. Villages were

II

Garbage was

Running water and plumbing were

far

disease

together.

still

still

luxuries,

in the countryside

plumbing and

notes, skirts

thrown on the and bathrooms

were

also

still

until after

World War

electricity.

Yet in city and countryside

Eugen Weber

cities,

enveloped by dust and mired in muck, and

was endemic. Remote places would wait

for indoor

still

any-

alike, the

changes were obvious. In Paris,

no longer had

to

be picked up; cigarettes

were no longer rolled by hand, and snuff was no longer used. People spat less and

were

less likely to

use their hands for blowing their noses.

There was more linen and laundering

More people could skills

— and more

handkerchiefs too.

count, read, and consult their watches. Each of these

was necessary

to survive in industrial society. Artificial light

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

87

allowed people to extend their days for advantage and pleasure. Corrugated metal garbage cans, introduced in 1883 by order of Prefect Poubelle, added a

new

note to Paris's early-morning symphony. In

1894 Poubelle imposed a law that

sewer system:

—

tout a I'egout

In the countryside, too,

all

wastewater go directly to the

everything

life

down

the drain!"

was undergoing

a dramatic change.

Public schools, a

money economy, and banks

from

who had white-collar jobs showed

city cousins

about a world of bright

desire

did their share. Visits rural villagers

Conscripted young peasants posted to the

possibilities.

Roads and

all

trains

cities

lights. Politics linked rural locales to cities.

brought streams of goods and released torrents of

their

wooden shoes

(sabots),

the 1920s and after,"

countryman and is

Weber quotes

writer, "peasants

still

by 1900 or so most people

could afford a second pair of shoes to wear in town or to

That

learned

and envy. Weber notes that even though peasants might

have worn

new

2i

fete.

"By

Pierre Jakez Haelias, a Breton

no longer walked

like their fathers.

because they wear different shoes; the roads are tarred; there

are not so

many

slopes.""

The countryside was being changed by

a

sheer abundance of goods as Western society entered a period of "ac-

cumulation and

display."^"*

Susan Hanson has charted a new rural world nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Virginia

in the

making

in late

by examining contem-

porary store inventories, photographs of stores, and mail-order catalogues.''

She discovered that the agents of change were humble. People

had more bedding and clothing,

ham,

flannel,

and muslin.

A

as indicated

larger

by increased

sales

of ging-

number of better brooms and dec-

orated chamber pots further distanced people from their dusts and

88

/

THE GREAT CLEANUP

wastes.

The cookstove and

the kerosene

lamp

—two

important factors

in reordering rural life in this period

—induced

more matches, chimneys, and wicks

for their lanterns.^^

brooms and brushes helped sweep away

the

country people to buy

Manufactured

kingdom of dust

as well.

Lye, washboards, and bar soaps improved washing. Screens, insect

powders,

some of

fly

paper, and rat poisons announced an intensified

war on

the rural world's oldest enemies. In vigorous efforts to clean

up the defects of body and mind, an amazing variety of patent medicines (often laced with brandy or all

types; opiates

were used

men and women showed more

rum) were used against aches and pains of to treat mental disorders.

At

same time,

the

an interest in the finer things of life by buying

banjos, books, and petticoats.

THE NEW BROOM REDISTRIBUTES DUST Between 1865 and still

awash

in dust

1925,

and

men and women

dirt,

in the countryside,

looked forward to more wholesome

In 1900, Europeans and North Americans could expect a

standard of living.

though

More and more people

much

lives.

higher

lived free of disease. Infant

mortality rates began to drop.^^ Improvements in sanitation and water supply, involving considerable feats of engineering, reduced the in-

cidence of typhoid and cholera. Better mother and infant care, im-

proved hygiene and housing conditions, better nutrition, more education,

and active government

all

converged

to create

a healthier

environment. Like a great broom, the Industrial Revolution swept dust into the gutters and to the margins of urban experience. character.

It

increasingly

became the

Dust took on

soot, ash,

a different

and smoke that early

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

89

of progress, rather than the

industrialists declared signs

soil

and pollen

of ages past. City dust was an irregular mix of sands from construction sites

and manufactured wastes of all

were

factory yards, grime and trash soil

were

rare.

sorts.

as

Along

railroad tracks

common

and

to dust as pollen

Dust revealed what society made and consumed.

It

in

and

was

increasingly mixed with metal fragments and glass shards. Foundries,

and construction

factories,

also varied

worker

from

produced

sites

city to city,

to worker. Children

their

neighborhood

knew

to

their place

own

specific dusts.

Dust

neighborhood, and even

and

their parents

by

their

distinct dusts.^^

Throughout

the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, in-

dustry produced extraordinary volumes of dust that fouled the earth, water, and

of Britain

air.

Reviewing

B.

W. Clapp's

recent Environmental History

since the Industrial Revolution^ J- R-

waters of the river Calder (tributary to the

gray ink in the i86os; and ...

amused themselves by

in the

McNeill noted: "The

Humber) could be used

as

same decade urchins routinely

setting fire to the waters of the Bradford Canal,

In 1936, the waters of the Trent were lethal to

all

animal and plant

life

for a stretch of 130 miles."

Nevertheless, in the next sixty years in the West, a lot of old-

fashioned dusts nearly vanished, along with

many of

their sources:

unregulated manufacturing, defecating horses, open sewers, and un-

paved

streets

common

gave way to a cleaner and more orderly time. Once the

stuff of

everyday

peasant was from the

new

life,

dust

was vanishing from

industrial democratic

Dust no longer defined the

small,

life.

and the small was no longer co-

incidental with dust. In the twentieth century, the finite

90

/

THE GREAT CLEANUP

the city as the

became

a matter

of atoms and microbes

— and human

control of them.

The great cleanup

prepared for humanity's encounter with these hitherto unseen

entities.

The

tools to

Industrial Revolution,

mop up and

which provided society with the

sanitize the world, turned humanity's gaze

downward toward

inward and

things unseen.

THE GREAT CLEANUP

/

91

CHAPTER

FI VJE_

ATOMS AND MICROBES NEW GUIDES TO THE SMALL AND INVISIBLE For the

infinitely little is equivalent to the infinitely great.

—Maurice If a

drop of water were magnified to the

atoms

in

it

would be about

—Lawrence We

Maeterlinck, The Life of an Ant

Bragg,

size

of the world, the

as large as cricket balls.

"The Atom,"

A

Short History of Science

share the world with an incredible vast host of invisible things.

—A.

L. Baron,

Man

against

Germs

In the twentieth century, smallness and dust have diverged.

We

have

found new invisible orders in the world and within the human body,

and our hopes and

our industry and society, have increasingly

fears,

centered on these invisible entities.

and microbes, discovered

Two of the most powerful are atoms

in this century to

peoples attributed to the heavens

have the force that medieval

— and more. They have preempted

dust as the primary representative of the small, and, in turn, have differentiated

and defined dust

ON THE WAY TO At

I

O

particles.

"

^ '

the start of the twentieth century, few people in Western civilization

thought, or even knew, about atoms.

The newly emerging

intellectual

much

orders of the unseen had not reached the pubHc's attention,

become

objects of interest.

that io~'

Even

if

some people could have grasped

second (one-tenth of a second)

an eye blink, what would

is

they have done with the notion that io~" second

photon, a particle of

The

less

light, to cross the

speculations of the first-century

is

the time

it

takes a

nucleus of an atom?'

Roman

atomist Lucretius were

generally as remote to the world of 1900 as they were to his

De

own

time.

—

Few

people would have found the poetry in his

lyric

of "[the] nature [which runs] ever by unseen bodies," those "sight-

less

bodies sweeping through /

The

rerum natura

sea, the lands, the clouds,

the sky, vexing and whirling and seizing

all

tent

was

from

hurhan freedom. His primary

in-

and thus dispel the powers

to regularize the events of nature

and deeds of abundant and

along

again. "^ Lucretius's theory

contradictorily and anthropomorphically had atoms swerving their unalterable courses to preserve

that

fickle gods.

Evidently, Lucretius himself

was not consoled,

for

blaming events

not on gods but on atoms merely transferred responsibility for

human

misery from heaven to an insupplicable atomic microcosm. Indeed, Lucretius concluded

De

rerum natura with a dark description of the

great Athenian plague: those selves

numbered among

who

tended the sick quickly found them-

the dying.

And

so "death followed death,"

stacks of bodies filled the villages, and dead parents lay children. In the cities, to

which dying

upon dying

villagers flocked, piles of bodies

were concentrated around fountains and hallowed shrines of the nonresponsive gods.

"The whole

side itself with terror."^

had caused

all this

What

nation," Lucretius concluded,

consolation was

without acting in

it

to

know

"was be-

that

atoms

malice.'^

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

93

No

one then

—

or now, for that matter

such unapproachable

entities.

—would wish

Men and women

to

embrace

em-

are never keen to

brace a science that teaches that, to quote Tennyson, "the stars

.

.

.

blindly run."'' Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century progressed to-

ward

the twentieth, science turned to the

main

steps in

its

little

to explain the big.

The

descent into the atomic microcosm were Priestley's

discovery of oxygen, Boyle's

work on

gases, Lavoisier's triumphant

use of chemical measurement, Dal ton's atomic chart, and Mendeleyev's definition of the periodic table.

of his

New

Dalton said that the "one great object"

System of Chemical Philosophy was "to show the importance

of ascertaining the relative weights of the ultimate particles, both of simple and

compound

bodies."'

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the indivisible kernel, the nut that could not

be cracked

open. In 1895, William Roentgen discovered the

—

atom

—

the

started to break

X ray.

In 1896, A. H.

Becquerel discovered radioactivity in uranium. In 1897, J.J.

Thomson

discovered the electron. In 1898 Marie and Pierre Curie discovered

polonium and radium, having laboriously salts

isolated

one gram of radium

from eight tons of pitchblende. Together Becquerel and the Curies

showed

that particles

emanated from "the

indivisible

atom"

in the

form

of radioactivity.

These discoveries gave microcosm. The scale of

birth to nuclear physics this

miniature world

is

and to a whole new represented by the

discovery of the hydrogen atom, which has a diameter of lo"'" meter,

and the atomic nucleus, a mere io~"^ meter across. From there, physicists in ticles,

94

/

the late twentieth century have

measured

at

io~^° meter,

ATOMS AND MICROBES

moved on

to subatomic par-

and even smaller

entities.

Today

— have no mass

physicists investigate "things" that

and occupy

at all

no space. For the physicists of

this century,

nothing seemed too small to be

And what

divided, except perhaps the electron.

is this

nodule of exis-

tence but a tiny bit of negatively charged energy.-^ Physicists attempted

two everything they encountered. They continually asked,

to cut in

what

is

below the bottom.^

If traveling

meter were equal to traveling

lo"^

inward

realm of io~"^

to the

meters in space, the distance tra-

versed would equal traveling to the sun and back 3,250 times. Another

measure of the nuclear

microcosmic adventure was

physicists'

mind-stopper: In a thimble there are million trillion trillion trillion

and you

still

God

In The

have

left

Particle^

estimated to exist a

electrons at any one

(10''^)

can get your thumb in

statistically

this

moment

there.*^

Leo Lederman writes of trendy

physicists

who

behind such "established entities" as the proton and neutron.

These proponents of "superstring theory" hypothesize the existence of a

new breed of

particles rarest

is

particles less than io~^^

too subtle in

and heaviest of all,

movement and scientists

meter across.^

hypothesize has not existed in nature

which gave

fifteen billion years ago. In 1994, science celebrated the

this rare

mother

of these

size to identify; another, the

since a fragment of a second after the Big Bang, it

One

particle, called the top

birth to

discovery of

quark (the term quark was

supposedly taken from James Joyce's Finnegans IVake).^

This unseen world materialist

is

anything but predictable. In contrast to the old

model of the atomic world, which posited matter

as a

bunch

of billiard balls moving around empty space and occasionally bumping into each other, this

new realm of the

invisible

is

complex, diverse, and

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

95

subtle,

form and motion often indicated only by

its

on the most

traces recorded eralized.

ture of a

As

Edward Harrison

faint

and ephemeral

refined machines and then statistically gen-

speculates,

"A

particle ...

is

a vibrant crea-

world made cunningly."'

little

Harrison's quote indicates, physicists often resort to metaphor to

convey

a sense of a universe too

complex

be described accurately in

to

anything but the most complex and arcane mathematical language.'"

Stephen Hawking has popularized the existence of black holes, caused

when

a star collapses in

on

itself

under

its

own

gravitational force and

condenses to zero volume." Hawking has more recently argued that black holes

somehow

come from nothing poetry of

poetry

is

all this

required

Yet for the the

first

domain of the

after

The

all.

it

could be said that something does

abstract, elemental,

cannot be missed. In

"when

it

comes

to atoms.

few.

Most people heard no

They had no

Niels Bohr argued that

"'^

celestial

novations as radio and television.

metaphor could

whole galaxy of atoms held

made

The atom

easily

destiny.'^

in the atom's

the Curies, or Ernest

possible such popular inas

an object of theory or

be ignored. In

less interest

perhaps the

fact,

than a single ant-hill, which,

as Maeterlinck observed, contains a replica in secret

and

song

appreciation for the subatomic

Thomson, Roentgen, Becquerel,

Rutherford, though these discoveries

a subject of

fact,

and paradoxical

half of this century, the language of physics remained

spin or in energy's dance.

discoveries of

Thus

"leak."

of our

human ways

But the results of contemporary physics could not be

ignored forever. In the words of Charles Gillispie, "Physics It is

education.

It is

war. Materially at

men, the hope or the end of the

96

/

ATOMS AND MICROBES

least,

world."'"*

it

holds

all

is

power.

things for

all

— The importance of the atom ness with the flash of the

on Japan

in 1945.

two atomic bombs the United

States

The hermetic power of the atom became

visible. It

was manifested

surrender

it

in the devastation the

was forced

all

dropped

blindingly

bomb wrought,

brought about, and the nuclear arms race

Even without knowledge of the public

abruptly entered the world's conscious-

it

the

engendered.

the dangers and uses of radioactivity,

ponder the might of the atom. Something

to

immense had come from something

tiny.

Even boys and

girls in

grade

school in the 1950s learned the symbol for radioactivity and began to

argue whether chain reactions have an end.

germs: the invisible enemy If the

atomic

bomb

offered a rapid education in the powers of the small,

germ theory had already begun to the unaided eye can cure

thing

— from

to teach people that particles invisible

and

kill.

Germ

the largest organ to the dust

on

theory held that everythe head of a pin

—was

teeming with microorganisms. Germs altered people's sense of what inhabited the unseen worlds around and within their

own

bodies.

For biologists and medical professionals, germ theory opened up a rich

and intriguing world and new

ease and tissue

its

treatment.

was seen

as a

The dark

side of

understanding dis-

germ theory was

that

all

living

permanent battleground between microorganisms-

from parasites and bacteria and digest other

possibilities for

cells)

to viruses

—and

and phagocytes

(cells that

engulf

every part of the biological kingdom was

the dining table of another part.

Germ theory laid to rest the notion of spontaneous generation, which had ruled since

Aristotle.

People realized that frogs were not spawned

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

97

Escherichia coh bacterium

Phagocyte engulfing, ingesting,

and

digesting bacteria

killing,

out of marsh mud, eels from river water,

from rotting meat.

Germ

worms from

theory extended the kingdom of

ate, strove,

life

and reproduced.

into the invisible.

human body,

Before the discovery of germs, doctors could view the but disease and

its

on the body remained

effects

Laboratories and diagnostic techniques did not

ments were few. Hospitals were

rife

formed

At

in appalling conditions.

a matter of conjecture.

on the top

floor,

with infections. Surgery was perits

best,

was

it

carried out in the

from

that theater,

probably killed a good share of patients.

Howard Haggard

Ignorance abounded.

Tests and instru-

exist.

natural light of a surgical theater, but the trip to or

often located

flies

theory replaced the notion of spontaneous

generation with microscopic creatures that

Germ

the soil, or

reports that Pierre Bayle

(1647— 1706) queried whether transfusions between humans would

change temperament and whether transfusion of sheep's blood to

would ultimately turn

dog

the

proposed to use transfusion

unhappy

as a

means

An

early

dog

German surgeon

to reconcile the parties of an

marriage.'^

Of course, tensified

into a sheep.

a

investigation of the inner workings of the

from the

body had

in-

seventeenth century on. Battista Morgagni

late

(1682— 1771) emphasized the need for the pathological study of tissue.'^

Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) distinguished twenty-one types of tissue and linked

them

to functions

Cells, first identified

by

cosm of living organisms (1804-1881), Theodore

of the body. the early microscopists,

in the nineteenth century.

became

the micro-

Mathias Schleiden

Schwann (1810— 1882), and Rudolph Virchow

(1821-1902) argued that disease did not originate in the body as a

whole, or even in a particular organ or

tissue,

but within a single

cell.

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

99

Schleiden, a professor of botany, announced in 1838 that "the cell the basic living unit of all plant structures" and directed botanical

away from

classification

animal kingdom. "There

is

He

the formation of cells."

cell

theory to the

one universal principle of development for

the elementary parts of organisms,

single cell

work

of plants toward the study of individual plants

and plant embryology. In 1839 Schwann extended

is

is

however

different,

conceived of life

and

this principle

itself as starting

and developing from the formation of other

cells.

from a

'^

Early microbiology was supported by a number of developments in the nineteenth century. Microscopes tories.

Anatomy improved

became commonplace

in labora-

dramatically, thanks in part to the abundant

maimed bodies and cadavers provided by

the Napoleonic battlefields.

Dissection became so widespread that people feared the poorhouse primarily because they dreaded ending up as a cadaver on the slab of a

young, ambitious surgeon.'^ Anesthesia demonstrated the power of

and permit longer and more

invisible gases to relieve pain

surgical operations. Needles cal for scientific

and syringes (originally designed by Pas-

purposes and popular with Moliere's doctors) became

important medical instruments.

A

variety of endoscopes, used to ob-

serve interior canals and hollow organs,

example, the speculum

—

internal cavities of the body.

human

eyes.

a candle

—was

tools.

For

end of a rod that used to study the

The ophthalmoscope was used

The two-ear

around 1840) was used

became standard

a small mirror fixed to the

was illuminated from a distance by

into

intricate

to peer

stethoscope (refined by Joseph Skoda

to listen to the body's sounds.

The S-shaped

sigmoidoscope, an illuminated tubular instrument, was used to examine the rectum, while rectal cystoscopes and bronchoscopes allowed other

intrusions into the body.''

[oo

/

ATOMS AND MICROBES

Edward

Jenner's success with vaccination gave England and Europe

a convincing display of medicine's

power

(The Chinese had known about vaccination

to manipulate the unseen.

for centuries.) Jenner used

benign cowpox to provide immunity against deadly smallpox

—

as

con-

tagious and deadly a killer as Europe had known.^° Jenner demonstrated that people could to kill them: a

be saved from death by the very sword that sought

little

dose could do great good.

Other insights pointed medicine toward microscopic worlds. observed that minute parasites and fungi caused diseases.

It

was

Some mi-

crobes were shown to thrive in vomit; others were shown to cause

ringworm. Long before Joseph Lister developed teenth-century Viennese doctor

though

his

his antiseptic, a nine-

named Ignaz Semmelweis proved,

contemporaries were not convinced, that "childbed fever

who

can be spread from one patient to another by the very doctors trying to cure

it."^'

Medicine had progressed a long

the dark coast of disease and infection

man Louis

Pasteur and the

would probe For

when two

way

in

are

mapping

explorers, the French-

German Robert Koch, changed

the

way we

the landscape of the invisible.

his Hfelong battle to

understand and battle microorganisms,

Louis Pasteur (1822— 1895) became a national hero. His early chemical studies led to his 1848 discovery of molecular dissymmetry,

opened the door

to his influential

work on

which

fermentation. His subsequent

research on bacteria refuted the centuries-old theory of spontaneous generation. Pasteur matched this theoretical reach with practical in-

novations that aided vintners and brewers with controlling fermentation,

supported silkworm breeders in their battle against silkworm

diseases,

and helped chicken farmers combat chicken cholera. His vac-

cination techniques

were used successfully against anthrax and even

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

loi

the dreaded rabies.^^ In effect,

germ

theory, pioneered

fered clear Hnes of attack against invisible foes."

imacy and direction

to the

by

Pasteur, of-

offered both legit-

It

emerging cadres of hygienists, sanitary en-

gineers, surgeons, and military doctors.

Germ organs;

and

it

theory defined the precise effects of diseases on tissues and

it

described their passage from one living creature to another;

permitted the possibility of a complete narrative of contagion,

epidemic, and plague. In doing

these things,

all

it

transformed the

popular understanding of unseen and minuscule things.

new enemies

common

—

and focused

its

away from

on the germs

attention

Robert Koch (1843— 19 lo) was great microscopist.

Armed

invented by Ernst

Abbe and

with a

a

He

younger man than Pasteur and

new

new

traveled to

diseased body.

He

Zeiss, a

no one had before. In 1884

as

which had

Egypt

extracted the

a long history of

after its 1883

epidemic and

gases, not of soils

he was to prove, caused

It,

germs of tuberculosis from a

separated them from other germs and devised a test-

tube culture nutrient in which they could grow. into guinea pigs

and sprayed the

air

ATOMS AND MICROBES

Then he

with a

which the guinea pigs breathed. The animals

/

made by

techniques to stain his samples,

or waters but of a comma-shaped germ."

Koch

a

substage illumination technique

Germany with specimens "not of poison

cholera." In 1882

and dust

that inhabited them.

identified the source of cholera,

returned to

I02

altered the

generalities about dirt

world of bacteria

into the

terrorizing humans.^'*

germs

—and

a substage condenser

design firm, and using

Koch peered Koch

fiangi

identified

perception of small things, including dust. In particular, Pas-

teur's theories led the public

German

and

bacteria, viruses, yeast,

It

died.^*

injected the

fine infected mist,

Trypanosoma gambiense,

the

protoioon that causes African sleeping sickness

Koch

also discovered the pernicious

anthrax (1876),

wound

microorganisms responsible for

infections (1878),

or Egyptian ophthalmia (1883).

He

and infectious conjunctivitis,

contributed to a better understand-

ing of sleeping sickness, malaria, bubonic plague, and rinderpest." Together

Koch and Pasteur overturned

proverbs. Their discoveries asserted, see) does hurt

you."

Germ

perceptions and contradicted old

"What you

don't

know

(and can't

theory prepared societies to battle invisible

foes with science and chemistry.

It

pointed the

way

to a

new

line

of

cures that could be developed and manufactured in laboratories.

Other

scientists,

caught up in the enthusiasm generated by Pasteur

and Koch, gave form their

to the

microscopes on dust,

kingdom of the

small.

emerging

dirt,

They

many of the most

of microbiology.^* Turning

and darkness, they scrutinized the entire

linked disease to bacteria, protozoa, yeast,

molds, insects, and other minute causes of

field

life

forms.

By 1900

the microbial

important diseases had been established.^^

Spurred by germ theory, biology branched into diverse

fields.

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

103

Protozoology, the study of single-celled microorganisms, deciphered the sources of dysentery, syphilis, and sleeping sickness.

Entomology,

focusing on the role of insects in spreading disease, established that

typhus

is

by

fever

carried

by

a kind of louse;

bubonic plague by

by

ticks; sleeping sickness

a species

of

fleas;

relapsing

and malaria and

fly;

yellow fever by mosquitoes.'*^ Helminthology, the study of parasitic

worms, explained how fields

man

worms

certain

caused diseases. Each of these

played a role in penetrating the invisible and distinguishing hu-

beings' precise enemies in the microcosm.^'

encouraged society to change

its

environment

And, of course, they minutest levels.

at the

In the same decade that physics introduced the Western

mind

to

subatomic science, microbiology declared the existence of the smallest,

most elusive and enigmatic creature of all: the sian bacteriologist Dmitri Josipovitch that passed

through

virus. In 1892, the

Rus-

Ivanovsky discovered organisms

his finest bacteria-trapping porcelain filters.

true cells but tiny particles, viruses exist in the frontier

and nonliving matter. Ivanovsky could not see

his

Not

between living

new

discoveries.

Measuring from 20 to 300 nanometers (io~' meter), they are submicroscopic; that

is,

they elude the traditional light microscope, which

can show objects as small as

Kt

micron

(io~'^ meter). It

microscopy and the short wavelengths of ultraviolet

took electron

light to bring vi-

ruses into view.

Once

discovered, viruses engendered spirited debate. Their absence

of cellular structure and their need to led

some

scientists to

material, even

While

104

/

though

their definition

ATOMS AND MICROBES

exist parasitically

on

living tissue

argue that they should be considered nonliving their ability to

remained

reproduce argues to the contrary.

in question, their significance did not.

Tobacco mosaic virus (loo nanometers)

They were discovered and such human

to

be the cause of many plant and animal diseases

killers as

smallpox, yellow fever, influenza, rabies, and

poliomyelitis.

Between 1880 and 1900,

biologists

isms and the chambers of the surpassed Lucretius, so

modern

cell.

opened the doors

As modern

microorgan-

atomists dramatically

biologists bypassed

Hooke. They traveled the range of microscopic cells

to

Leeuwenhoek and

life

and matter from

(io~^ meter) to the smallest viruses (io~' meter).

THE NEW DUSTS During the particles

first

half of this century, with the discoveries of subatomic

and microorganisms, the microcosm expanded immensely,

while the macrocosm seemed to contract in the face of

human power

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

105

to miniaturize to curve

it.

Even

inward on

years, the universe

in physics, Einstein's theory

Though now measured

itself.

somehow seems

far less

estimate that visible stars represent no total

made

space seem

in biUions

of Hght

awe-evoking. Astronomers

more than

ten percent of the

matter in the universe, yet the vastness of the universe

itself orig-

inated in an explosion of the smallest and shortest-lived particles.'^

The

transformation of dust in this century illustrates this revolution

of the microcosm. Once an unchallenged kingdom, dust was both a mixture and the

by

sum of all

small things.

Its

omnipresence was assured

the divisibility of matter. In this century, dust, like the

European

peasant of the old rural order, has been swept to the margins of life.

has lost

its

role as the first

is

no longer

of

particles.

a

and most

normal condition of

common measure life

of smallness.

scientific in-

vestigation, industrial production, and public health regulation. "It

19 1 2

we have

to

It

but a highly differentiated set

This differentiation of dust went hand and hand with

the invisible

It

is

guard against," declared Robert Hessler in his

book Dusty Air and

III

Health, which set as

its

goal the identifi-

cation of dusts that cause diseases.^^ Fashionably, he placed dust in the

framework of evolution. Before humans, there were cosmic, volcanic, desert, pollen,

and animal

trail dusts.

With

early

humans

dusts from tents, domesticated animals, and villages.

there appeared

(Somehow Hessler

ignored the dusts generated by plowing, harvesting, and milling.) Next

appeared "shop dust," "paved street dust," "factory dust in variety," "sidewalk dust with

spittle,"

and "trailing dress dust,"

correlate with such causes of illness as "large factories;

ements; dusty and

106

/

smoky

ATOMS AND MICROBES

air,"

all

of which

crowded

ten-

and corresponding medical conditions.

In simplified terms, the absence of pure air in large cities

made

the

contemporary period "the age of hospitals and dispensaries; one of throat and chest specialists."

As

Hessler sought to associate specific sicknesses with certain dusts,

Mitchell in his

unless

Prudden (more

in

accord with contemporary science) wrote

Dust and Its Dangers (1903), "[Dust]

among

its

ingredients are the living

is

not dangerous or harmful

germs which come from the

bodies of the persons suffering from bacterial causes. "^^

Germ

theory

bifurcated dusts into those with and those without deadly microorgan-

isms that ferried disease back and forth between humans and other living creatures.

Other

scientists also differentiated dusts. Volcanologists,

ogists, soil scientists, industrial doctors,

the

many groups of

scientists

who

meteorol-

and sanitarians were among

focused on different particulates.

Forensic scientists solved crimes with fine dust, while archaeologists

examined dusts

to reconstruct the lives

of earlier

duction engineers refined their analysis of dusts.

A

civilizations.'^

Pro-

1936 text. Industrial

Dust^ underlines the importance of ascertaining the electrical and optical characteristics of specific dusts. '^

This required chemical and mineral-

ogical analyses and the determination of particle size, velocities, and flocculation patterns.

The

text offered a technical discussion

about dust

control (with specific references to exhaust and air-cleaning systems)

and considerations of dusts injurious to safety and health. In the

first

half of the twentieth century, then, dust

came under

continuous examination. Led by universities and industrial laboratories, systematic interest in the microcosm multiplied and accelerated. Scientific disciplines

divided and multiplied like the cells and molecules

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

107

they studied. Industries did the same.

The annual aggregate

sales

of

measuring devices to research, laboratories, and the military would reveal the extent of the twentieth century's

and the

invisible

—and

engagement with the small

suggest the identification of civilization with the

control of miniature things.

Even steelmaking

illustrates this conjunction.

of Minnesota, located on the

state's

The

taconite industry

Mesabi Iron Range, turned on the

success of a single University of Minnesota laboratory." Researchers

faced several complex problems.

They had

to find

machines and pro-

cesses to crush an exceptionally hard hematite ore into fine dust particles

and then

find a

means

to

agglomerate and pelletize those particles

into sufficiently large spheres to prevent the circulation of gases in the

smelting process from blowing them the flue.'* Success,

dust into

—and

the company's profits

which took several decades

army tanks

in the nick

to achieve, turned iron

of time to face Axis forces.

In peace and at war, twentieth-century industry in

its

—up

grew more

precise

control of dusts and ultrafine materials. Chemical and pharma-

ceutical industries identified, manipulated,

and invented molecules. One

chain of molecules, called synthetic polymers, accounts for the origin

of the plastics industry. Each year the United States alone makes 30 million tons of plastics, light, durable, water-resistant materials that,

when

translucent, can substitute for glass

healthier,

and

less

dusty place.

Industry's need to cesses

and make the world a cleaner,

spawned new

work with minute

entities

and minuscule pro-

industries dedicated to creating precision measur-

ing instruments. Balances became electric, rulers gave eters,

108

/

and gauges were invented

ATOMS AND MICROBES

to

way

to

microm-

measure heat, volume (of

liquids,

— gases,

and

solids), pressure,

and

materials.^'

Highly refined

the types associated with electricity and computers, have

industries,

done what

past ages never conceived of doing: they have dedicated entire laboratories to dust

and

laboratories have

dreamed

of:

The

particle control/"

made

possible

"clean rooms" of computer

what no medieval

had ever

artisan

products completely free of dust.

The new

laboratory tools include

X

rays, electron microscopes,

echograms, spectrometers, and other sophisticated instruments. These

machines permit entrance into heretofore unseen worlds. In laboratories, scientists

engineer the invisible.

They

turn bacteria into cleaning

agents and conjure with molecular-scale technologies. In this world, dust has a specific particulate.

the

little

stuff of

known about it

The

no

place, unless

it is

assigned credentials as

old kind of mixed and undifferentiated dust

everyday

life

—

is

now

out of place. With so

the invisible, dust can never again be ordinary.

be considered minute when measured against the smallest

the

new microcosm.

when Western humanity followed

germ

cryptic and powerful worlds.

more

Nor can

entities

of

A great divergence of dust and smallness occurred

in this century

into

much

the

atom and the

ATOMS AND MICROBES

/

109

CHAPTER

SIX,

DISCERNING THE THE I NVI S I B IE EOR GOOD OE THE NATION It is

the invisible

we have

to

—Robert

By

guard against. Hessler, Dusty Air

and

III

Health

— commerce, indus-

the end of the nineteenth century, great forces-

try,

nationahsm, democracy, and reform

—were

leading Westerners to

climb the world's highest mountains, explore the deepest jungles, agriculturally transform the vast grasslands

and trade with, colonize, and of the globe, while ples

at

home

in other

of North and South America,

ways dominate

the other peoples

they dramatically changed their

own

peo-

and lands. Presuming there was nothing under the sun, great or

small, that they could not dominate.

Western science, technology, and

medicine pushed into the microcosm. The West's capacity to understand and regulate the microscopic realm established

nance and underlay

much of

its

sense of superiority.

its

global domi-

With immensely

expanded control over dust and germs. Western peoples enjoyed longer

and better

lives: in

England and Wales, for example, male

life

expec-

tancy rose from approximately forty years in 1850 to sixty-eight by 1950.' Healthier

and happier peoples

meant stronger

in turn

nations.

After 1900, control of the small and the invisible became vital matters

of individual rights and national well-being. The history of public health and medicine reveals

how

peoples of the West in the

of the twentieth century came to adapt their

first

new

lives to a

half

order of

small and invisible things.

FIGHTING THE UNSEEN Twentieth-century public health was defined by the previous century's

mounting concern

and cleanliness and by the bac-

for national health

teriological revolution.

The

of public health began to take form

field

in the first half of the nineteenth century as a response to

new move-

ments and urban concentrations of people precipitated by the Industrial Revolution.^

Its

psychological origin lay in both a fear of the masses

and a sense of responsibility for the good of society attitude

on the part of the

elite

was enhanced by

fear of

and revulsion

toward the dust, disorder, and disease that seemed to lurk

neighborhoods of the new industrial

cities

and

This

at large.

in the

a surging

poor

optimism

about realizing the most Utopian Enlightenment goals of cleaning up humanity, body and soul

alike.

What

precedented optimistic conscience the

—

as

newfound control over water and

and materials. Also underpinning pipes, cables,

On

and wires and

this

a thicket

supported I

this altogether

suggested in chapter 4

un-

—was

lighting and innovative machines

conscience was a forest of urban

of rules and ordinances.

both sides of the Adantic, public health faced

its

greatest

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

/

iii

challenges in the crowded conditions of the industrial

cities.

migrants were concentrated and conditions seemed darkest,

most dangerous. Reformers and the plight of industrial

crowded

soldiers

There

dirtiest,

and

called attention to the dangers of industries

society.^ In recently

formed national armies,

into barracks increased the possibility for epidemics.

In schools, where students and germs mingled, inspectors preached that

generations of disease-laden and poorly fed youth would never produce a great nation.'* National greatness

poor eyesight and head

things,

As much

germ theory

as

depended on reform of the smallest

lice

—

included.

formulated and developed in the

decades of the nineteenth century

—

influenced public health,

derail the great cleanup's effort to eradicate plain old dust

Germ

it

last

did not

and

dirt.

theory also was not accountable for the nineteenth-century de-

cline in infectious diseases or the decreasing mortality rate, victories

that

had

their sources in the early sanitary

the field of public health ease.

The

contagionists

reform movement.^ In

was divided between two approaches

fact,

to dis-

promoted the adoption of general hygiene and

the eradication of dirt because

it

harbored germs; the infectionists

sought to stop the spread of particular germs and impose quarantines. In either case,

of public

germ theory

health.'^ It

lent the credibility

of science to the

field

provided a spine of intellectual coherence to the

diffuse

and variegated theorizing about

eclectic

body of

teaching,

illness

which comprised

a

and

to public health's

jumble of remedies and

regulations.''

Germ disease

theory supported public health officers

by regulating

city housing, water,

paigners with precise targets and in

112

/

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

some

who

and wastes.

sought to prevent It

provided cam-

instances resulted in spectac-

ular successes, without contradicting the expanding impulse to

make

objects and people dust- and dirt-free.

Germ

theory did, however,

let

dust off the

hook

as the

primary

cause of disease. At a 1902 annual meeting of the American Public

Health Association, Dr. Charles V. Chaplin, an eminent medical professor

and

later the

author of a classic textbook on infection, described

the major shift in public health in the United States

from the

filth

theory

of disease to the germ theory in these terms:

When

our honored and lamented [Walter] Reed went to Havana and

discovered that yellow fever was transmitted by the bite of a mosquito, [he] drove the last nail in the coffin of the filth theory of disease. ... It

was believed

for infectious diseases. cry. Sanitarian

that the municipality

Pure

air,

was

chiefly responsible

pure water, and a pure

was

the

reform was engaged principally in protecting drinking

water from organic contamination, in building sewers,

plumbing

soil

into a complicated

removing dead animals,

and expensive

in collecting

art, in

in

developing

clearing streets, in

garbage and removing house-

hold rubbish, in whitewashing and repairing tenements, in the regula-

and the general suppression of

tion of offensive trades,

affecting the sense of smell. that dirt

may be

Of course,

the cause of sickness.

municipal cleanliness

is

there .

.

is

some

all

nuisances

truth in the idea

But with minor exceptions,

.

no panacea. There

is

no more royal road

to

health than to learning.*

Mirroring the tendency toward specialization in

all

of society, germ

theory turned society's attention to detailed investigations of precise causes

—

to

those nuisances that, in Chaplin's words, "clearly and

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

/

113

directly

menace

eluded the

These enemies were always hidden and often

health."'

microscopes.

finest

Aided by germ theory, public health

officials

made

cleanliness a

matter of public morality. In Civics and Health (1909), William Allen defined health as "a civic obligation."

He

issued a call for imperative

"courses in germ sociology."'" Every schoolchild should

know not only

the presidents but the story of microorganisms and

communicable

all

diseases as well. In 19 12,

school textbook

titled

two American authors produced an elementary

The

Human Body and Its Enemies?^

In the preface

they forged a stunning link between cleanliness, race, and germ theory:

"The

essential principle

of hygiene has ever been cleanliness.

The

race

has developed an instinctive horror of the unclean. Since the discovery

of microorganisms as the causative agents of disease, however, our

adherence to cleanliness has become

specific

and

So the

intelligent."'^

masses, beginning in grade school, were to be taught an

official

view

of the small.

By World War were

as real

and

I,

as

a portion of the public already believed that

deadly as battlefield enemies.

called attention to the

germs

The war not only

poor health of so many of the nation's young

but also focused public sentiment on the invisible legions of disease awaiting the boys from

War mobilized

a

long

home

list

in the strange lands

of traditional foes: typhoid, scurvy, dysentery,

and venereal disease were among the

first

volunteers.'^

learned what military historians had always known:

comrades

where they fought.

in arms. Victory itself

Whole

nations

war and plague

depended on health

—and

are

health de-

pended on winning the microscopic war.

A

114

/

1

917 sanitarian guide taught U.S. medical officers that their army's

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

— warm and

well-being depended on more than keeping soldiers

Hygiene, said the guide, played an essential

ology required not

The new

role.''*

just sanitation (housing, water,

dry.

bacteri-

and privies for the

thousands) but also attention to communicable diseases and their vectors.

The guide

were required

listed

to

dangerous animals, both wild and domestic. Ships

guard against disease's

which was becoming vector, joining dust

in the

contemporary mind an invidious animal

and darkness with germs and

influenza epidemic of 191 8 and 19 19, in the

stealthiest carrier, the rat,

which

killed

The

disease.

terrible

twenty million people

United States and Europe, proved that germs had signed no

armistice at Versailles.

The war

intensified the belief that nations

carrying outsiders. In

Germany

anarchists and communists,

after

were besieged by germ-

World War

were judged

to

I,

Jews, along with

be not only morally cor-

rupting but physically contaminating society. Racism took on an even

more

precise biological quality.

racial purity,

The

Nazis, in their obsessive quest for

medicalized their anti-Semitism. Using pseudoscientific

propaganda, they depicted Jews as vectors for germs, associating them "with

rats,

laden."'^

and

They

all

that

is

dark,

hairy, infested,

redefined Jews in terms of the

The dawning knowledge of the once again proved

itself

small

capable

—

of making an arrow out of every

Throughout

filthy,

new medical microcosm.

was used

to serve ideology.

to use an old

Hate

French expression

stick.

the twentieth century, the education

received about germs varied considerably ity.

and disease-

Popular conceptions of the small

by

moved

Western

class, nation,

in

citizens

and ethnic-

and out of focus and

grew dim or bright depending on the seriousness of

disease and the

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

/

115

successes of public health in combating

With no homogenous body

it.

of knowledge or consistent legislation behind

it,

public health was a

patchy practice.

Naomi Rogers demonstrates

this variability in the case

of polio

at

the start of the century. Public health officials vacillated in the face of this

manifest

killer,

itarians' rules

fenses.

They

which evaded both

of prevention. Baffled

scientists'

officials

for sanitation

targeted the

working and immigrant

and quarantines,

of

New

York

much

as

as confessed

which comprised

concluded with a non sequitur:

The

by

even though epidemio-

its

The

state

inadequacy on a public health

a string

of disconnected orders and

"A watched

child

is

a safe child. /

public responded to this confused information in contradictory

home

to spare

them away

to

swim

in public

dirt

swimming

and contaminated

pools.

Some

to the country,

and disease.

air

kept them

them any contact with the contagion, while others where the

air

was

cleaner.

"this dread spectre," officials debated the relationships

dirt,

prejudicially

fly.""^

and forbade them

sent

flies.

groups were largely immune.

ways. Parents cautioned their children about

at

which they

insights, they offered useless old instructions.

bulletin board,

Swat the

in

classes,

logical evidence indicated that these

Lacking new

reverted to familiar de-

and campaigns against

called for attacks against dirt

They pushed

microscopes and san-

Scientists contested the connection

Disarmed

between

between

air,

illness,

environment, and individual behavior. But arguments could not banish germs.

The

The

small

was

still

a

/

—and

it

could be deadly.

response to the polio epidemic foreshadowed public health

egy throughout much of the

ii6

mystery

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

rest

of the

first

strat-

half of the century. Officials

"Swat

the

fly/"

merged germ theory with older teachings about personal hygiene and cleanliness.

They

included in the war against dirt and dust battles

against specific germs.

A standard hygiene and prevention manual from

1937 sent parents and caretakers worrying and scurrying in as directions as fear and anxiety could carry

an indiscernible enemy. dust and germs:

it

Women

anyone locked

in battle

with

especially fought a daily battle against

required attention to a very long

started with nutrition

many

and clothing, went on

list

of things that

to exercise,

and did not

neglect sex and bodily excretions. In the home-front battle against dis-

homeowners had

ease,

to inspect lighting, heating, ventilation,

sewage systems, not forgetting eaves, troughs, and ities

had equally extensive

duties,

and

gutters. Municipal-

which required the regulation of air

and water, bathing places, sewage disposal, food, and drugs, among

many

others.'^

As advancing knowledge extended human

surveillance and control

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

/

117

to

more and more of

the small and invisible, sanitation required an

inventory of everything on and in which germs could reside.

American Red Cross Text Book, on

Home Hygiene and

The

1933

Care of the Sick

reminded readers that "the microscope has revealed the existence of innumerable

little

crowded together on and its

plants and organisms, so small that even millions are invisible to the

in everything.

own

set

of germs

their characteristics

Nearly every

— and who

and

how

naked eye."'^ Germs could lurk

illness

or infection supposedly had

could master their names,

to prevent them.'*

much

less

This sort of education

confronted people with a microcosmic realm too vast for the mind to grasp.

It

objects.

required that they think and feel differently about familiar

But were they to carry microscopes with them to inspect every

Even

surface.''

if

they did,

life

could not be lived hygienically in a

bubble.

However misunderstood germ theory had taken "In the short span of

or inconsistently acted on, the truth of

hold.

little

By

the late 1930s a doctor could claim,

more than

which previously were formidable rare."''

By

new

risks

diseases

States.

have become

infections

uncommon

or

While cautious proponents suspected

would appear and

that old ones

boldest proclaimed medicine's victory. that

many

1940, infectious disease accounted for only about 15 percent

of all deaths in the United that

half a century,

would

The imminent

had terrorized humanity suggested

that the

resurface, the

defeat of diseases

microcosm was on the

verge of being tamed.

Perhaps no twentieth-century victory seemed more decisive than the apparent elimination of tuberculosis,

throughout history and

118

/

at the

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

which had wreaked havoc

end of the nineteenth century was the

world's most contagious, debilitating, and killing disease. In 1900, "tuberculosis

was not only

States, the captain

of the

mous amount of chronic victims."^''

The

the chief single cause of death in the United

Men

of Death, but

illness

and

disability

it

also

produced an enor-

among

the millions of its

disease cut across class lines, attacking the lungs of the

poet, the urban worker, and the nurse and doctor

who

treated them. It

festered in confined living quarters and literally spread as easily as

breathing in and out. In advanced stages, its

hosts to

it

attacked the lungs, causing

cough up infected sputum. The

bacilli

within the sputum

survived for a considerable time outside the body. inhaled

by others through

They were then

the lungs, ingested with food, or even ab-

sorbed through pores in the skin.

By

1900, the

work of Koch and

the scientific hygiene

promised, in theory, the imminent defeat of tuberculosis. In ever, twentieth-century

movement fact,

how-

campaigns against the disease proved anemic,

emphasizing "individual responsibility while neglecting the deep-seated social

and economic problems that established close links between pov-

erty and tuberculosis."^' Western nations adopted diverse strategies for

treatment and prevention, which ranged from inoculation and injection to sanatoriums tality

and quarantine. Even though a "large decline

mor-

occurred before the introduction of specific and effective phar-

macological agents were brought into play," by midcentury that public health

it

appeared

had defeated the "white plague."^^ In the 1950s,

sanatoriums closed in droves.

drop

in

The United

States reported a 95 percent

in the tuberculosis death rate in the first half of the century. Britain

looked back on tuberculosis, the scourge of the nineteenth century, as an

affliction

of a bygone

era.

And

since the

World Health Organization

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

/

119

had distributed a tuberculosis vaccine

more than

to

fifty

million chil-

dren, the West's victory appeared to be shared with the world.^^

In 1950, it

when

West began

the

to sparkle cleaner than ever before,

appeared to be on the threshold of triumphing over the world's

smallest killers.

The

experiences of the

last half

of the nineteenth cen-

tury had elevated the public's expectations and the confidence of progressive thinkers. Sanitary measures had caused a dramatic decline in the incidence of infectious diseases, and science had

succession of discoveries of their

causes.^"*

The

first

made

a remarkable

half of the twentieth

century continued this phenomenal exploration of the concealed worlds of the

human

body.^^

government and

Thanks

to continuing sanitation, the apparatus

law, laboratories,

of

and public health campaigns, people

of the progressive nations read accounts of vanishing diseases and were offered both explanations of and cures for nature's most enduring,

men-

acing, and baffling puzzles.^^ It is

Now

no wonder

that

by 1950 medicine had won over

the public.

able to cure infections and eradicate diseases rather than merely

treat

symptoms, medicine had won impressive

foes.

Doctors and hospitals were curing more and killing fewer. Cru-

sading health

officials,

battles against invisible

acting like wartime mobilization boards, ordered

the nation about: people couldn't spit

where they wanted, they would

be quarantined and vaccinated, and fluoride in the water supply would

keep their teeth gleaming. Resistance to the medical model was sparse.

The

antivaccinationists

who had

the Atlantic, starting before

fought vaccination on both sides of

World War

I,

were now

scattered, only a

historical curiosity left to fight solitary, ineffectual skirmishes against

the "bullying health regime.""

120

/

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

This enhanced sense of well-being was increased by other Bright goods

made out of smooth-surfaced

were available

to the masses.

came standard household

plastic, Bakelite,

Washing machines and

appliances.

They

factors.

and vinyl

refrigerators be-

revealed a mixture of con-

verging ideologies advocating the clean, the fresh, and the healthy, and endorsing innovative materials, novel technologies, and mass manufacture

and design.^* There was a vast quantity of bright, washable

clothing. Soaps and deodorants contributed to olfactory domestication

of individuals and crowds. Beauty was truly more than skin deep;

went

to the

bones of the

culture.^'

Indoor

toilets

and

electricity

it

reached

most remote farms. Preventive, emergency, and highly specialized

the

medical services cast their protective net over the minds and bodies of

Western people. Though dust, ished, a

was

dirt,

and germs were not entirely ban-

new microcosmic regime had been

the brightest beacon of

hope

installed

— and

its

promise

to ever reach the dark shores of

suffering and diseased humanity.

FOLLOWING THE DOCTOR'S ORDERS Medicine emerged as philosopher and king of

this

new

order.

Fewer

people died from accidents, contagious diseases, the bite of a rabid dog (as

my

great-grandfather did), or a ruptured appendix (as

three-year-old Sicilian grandfather did). tures,

my

thirty-

Open wounds, compound frac-

and severe burns were testing grounds on which doctors and

pharmacists proved their control of unseen things. Their definition of the small (seen or unseen)

was

and becoming well could make

as incontrovertible as feeling less pain it.

Given the giant reward of good

health, the price of admission to the

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

/

121

— modern medicine was picayune. One needed only

theater of

power of germs, submit

a belief in the lethal

doctor or

specialist,

Modern medicine

observance of such simple happier

manded

far

The only was

life.

required so

little

rituals in return for its great

Surely religions and

more of their believers and

faith

promise of

much in

a

de-

return.

and prudent thing for any half-rational person

grateful

and

home remedies had

rarely offered as

to

do

to believe the medical doctrine of the hour.

Medicine's most convincing lessons about the invisible

powerful

came

new

in the

became

shrines

pill,

its

ability to

form of successful surgery,

relief

manipulate

of pain, and

drugs, including antibiotics like penicillin that for the

most part replaced

The

of the family

to the decrees

follow a basic health regimen, and occasionally

take a few medicines.

less painful,

to profess

sulfa

drugs after World

War

11.'"

where curing powders, sprays, and

a tablet of fine dust,

Medicine cabinets

liquids accumulated.

was contemporary medicine's Commun-

ion wafer. In the process of defining and manipulating the small and the invisible at the

being

—

nexus which matters most to people

medicine indoctrinated them into a

—

their lives

and well-

new view of their

relation-

ship to the microcosm. Medicine's basic education, complex science aside, rested

on an

reciprocity being tures,

and they

easily

one every peasant knew: humans

live off

of minuscule organisms. to identify

mainly

and

assumable view of things,

kill

humans. People share

The

trick

is

—and

its

law of

live off small crea-

their lives

this is

first

with a range

medicine's success

unwanted intruders while protecting helpful

entities,

bacteria.^'

Nearly universally in the West, people today observe the environ-

122

/

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

ment and

and bodily

fingernails,

The

through the lens of germ theory. Dust, skin,

their bodies

orifices are

seen as potential sources of infection.

color or consistency of bodily discharges

may

reveal the presence

of alien microbes within. Observable infection offers clues to the presence of invisible processes and forms the basis of medical judgments

on well-being.

Our minds germs make

are populated with ideas of germs.

soils rich

and digestive

tracts healthy.

More notorious germs cause

pleasant odors.

We know that helping Others cause un-

disease: mycobacteria

cause tuberculosis and leprosy, staphylococci cause boils, and gonococci are responsible for gonorrhea, while spirochetes sification

more

smaller,

cold

of

may be

germs

sinister viruses,

the source of

viruses

killers,

the

contested subject) cause syphilis.

a

is

—

still

—

AIDS

Some can fifty

is

understood of

from which they were

"mad cow

possibility of attack

the prion, a mysterious scrap of protein

disease" and related fatal conditions. that the greatest things

depend on the

those small things are defined, even controlled,

no longer Cleopatra's nose

speak, but the

least

years after infection to produce shingles.'^

Today people understand

perts. It

and

end of the twentieth century we face the

—and

common

hide for long periods: the chickenpox virus

by an even smaller invader,

smallest

there are the

and Ebola. In the microscopic world

until recently the smallest

can reappear as long as

associated with

clas-

constitute the greatest villains of the microcosm: they

probably derived.

at the

And

which aside from causing the

parasitize everything, including the bacteria

And

(whose biological

by

ex-

that determines history, so to

germs within her nose. The smallpox vaccination

scar

on the upper arm of nearly every schoolchild of a generation or two

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

/

123

ago marked our

initiation into science's

contemporary doctrine of the

small and dangerous. Surgical scars are other marks of passage into the

medical microcosm. More humble pressure readings at the local

fire station,

tests at the drugstore, enroll

invisible.

Each ingested

rituals, like visits to doctors,

blood

and the purchase of pregnancy

us in the medical view of the small and

aspirin testifies to an

agreement about the pow-

ers of tiny things.

Medical education includes an ever more elaborate pharmacological indoctrination.

As

has created finer, centuries,

old as spit and herbs, pestle and mortar,

more complex, and

pharmacy has become

of synthetic drugs.

Its

pharmacy

synthetic dusts. In the past

a precise science focused

two

on the use

fundamental stages are associated with the for-

mation of medical chemistry, the beginnings of the pharmaceutical dustry,

in-

and the formulation of germ theory. This history culminates

in

the second half of the twentieth century with the beginnings of im-

munotherapies and chemotherapies aimed diseases and with the

Of

course there

is

at treating

dawn of experimental gene

noncommunicable

therapies."

a fly in the ointment of medical

wars against

microbes. Outside the West, and particularly in underdeveloped regions, they have not always resulted in victories. In fact, depending

on

place and disease, they have frequently produced protracted stalemates

and even clear to

become

defeats.

As was already well known, microbes can evolve

resistant to

stronger and against them.

modern medicine's weapons. They become

more deceptive

As atoms

precisely because of the medicines used

in the

form of bombs proved deadly

century, so germs, in the form of

century's end, showing us

124

/

how

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

new

at

mid-

diseases, terrorize us at the

intractable

and

sinister the

unseen can

be.

But

this is getting

ahead of the

story. In the first half of the twentieth

century, science's discovery and control of the invisible brought to

humanity

became

—and

the microcosm,

a matter of

common

had delivered Western

which

it

good

named and commanded,

knowledge. Public health and medicine

civilization to a

profoundly different view of

small and invisible things.

DISCERNING THE INVISIBLE

/

125

CHAPTER SEVEN,

_.

M*

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM The

materials research

community has reached

of unprecedented power

in

its

a

new

plateau

ability to understand, control,

and

manipulate the world.

—Ivan Amato, For good or

we

ill,

Stuff:

The Materials

As twentieth-century Western

—

as the

of paved roads

the

all

testified

—

light

so

it

B. C. Crandall, Nanotechnology

civilization

sought to control the surfaces

it

also strove to light

creations. Electric lighting

bridges and skyscrapers to the neon glow of

—

possibilities."'

of landscapes,

filling

became

a con-

— from Las Vegas —"made and work

illuminated

in the desert.

so important to leisure, arts, sports,

sible the revisualization

and

them up. By the

could generate, the twentieth century out-

and dominant element of most spectacles

Lighting

Made Of

other civilizations. Indeed, illumination emerged as arguably

most sublime of human

stant

Is

growth of lawns and gardens and the proliferation

amount and type of shone

World

stand at the threshold of a molecular dawn.

—

of things

the

pos-

them with new meaning

In illuminating the desirable, lighting exposes the undesirable. Light reveals dust and dirt;

it

calls in

shovel. In the contemporary in

on them the broom, the

form of

a laser

beam,

cloth,

and the

light finds a place

America's $75-billion-a-year cleaning industry. Bursts of light deliv-

ered by lasers are used to remove grime, rust, and mildew.^ Illumination has lights

up the

and

a matter of taste

streets for safety

modulated to

lights are lit-up

become

fit

and mood.

and commerce, increasingly,

To have

cleaner

human bodies,

command

were

attention.

less bathing,

And

clothes.

or private

and voluptuous

lit

were certainly

home

less revealing.

On

common

glasses,

There were fewer

and hence

less staring

and

with scant lighting and heat and no bathrooms

people did not indulge in prolonged nakedness

sex.

treat bodily imperfec-

Sores, lesions, boils, rashes, tumors, polyps, and

defects

scrutiny.

seen nude less often. There

Medicine was not equipped to recognize or tions.

finer.

pockmarks, and acne were too

Human bodies were

— bedrooms — at

for dust

swimming, and washing, and fewer changes of

clothes

Even

room

blemishes and defects are accented. In preceding

windows, mirrors, or magnifying peeping.

is less

bodies are subject to the same brightly

centuries, scabs, birthmarks, to

home,

the surfaces appear without blemish, society conceals

beneath them a maze of wires, ever smaller and

Our own

at

personal tastes and prevailing styles. In the

world, small imperfections stand out; there

dirt.

If civilization

many

other

were considered simply "natural" and went unexamined.

No

medical imperative insisted on checkups, and few health regimens called for

air,

sunlight, or bathing.

The

science of dermatology did not exist.

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

/

127

Self-examination of one's

curred

—was

body

—and

one wonders

how

mucli oc-

not prescribed. Medicine had not yet even diagnosed a

range of nonspecific urethral infections, gonococcal and nongonococcal.^ It

accepted as natural and inevitable a variety of discharges from

the genital organs, especially of females, originating in infections such as vaginal thrush (a fungal infection)

and

salpingitis (inflammation

of

a fallopian tube).''

In the twentieth century a keener and fell

on the human body,

diverse forms, explored intensely.

it

light

did on other surfaces. This beam, in

downward and inward, ever more

finely

and

Like the early dissectionists' blades, the contemporary beam

(which in one of

tomography, or tissue,

as

more focused beam of

its

refined

contemporary forms

PET) probed

for the

first

is

positron emission

time into the most interior

which once had been considered the inscrutable cloth of God's

creation. Scientists of every discipline could

of the infinitesimal within and around

boundary of the small and the

invisible

now examine whole orders

human

still

beings, pushing the

farther back.

DUST BECOMES PARTICULAR Dust did not escape

this great illumination. It lost its credentials as a

simple God-given creation or the consequence of dust that people had set

known for centuries shattered

human

activity.

The

into a heterogeneous

of specific particulates. Under the microscope, dust was transformed

into thousands of different particles, each

worthy of

its

own

legion of

scientific experts.

Since the great cleanup and the revolution in technology,

128

/

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

all

sorts

of dusts have been examined. Cosmic dust, reaching across the universe, has

been measured

grams (io~'^

nanograms (io~' gram) and even femtobeen examined by optical telescopy and

grarn)- It has

by elemental

calculated

in

ratios, isotope ratios,

and the tracks of cosmic

rays.

On

earth, dust has

become

a matter of both curiosity

and concern.

National and regional politics have turned on the causes of

—from farming—

Industries

grain

mining, quarrying, and grinding to clothmaking and

and fungi

release into the air fine toxic dusts, molds,

that cause respiratory diseases

workers to a wheezing Specialists

silicosis.

halt.

have looked

and over time can bring the strongest

Agricultural dusts have also posed dangers.

at the

adverse effects of dust spraying, dust

concentration, and bio-aerosols in swine and poultry operations; dusts' distortion of soils; dust in droughts; to global

and the Dust Bowl's relationship

warming.

Some of

the lethal effects of dust are

more immediate.

elevators and other industrial environments, a single spark

In grain

from any

source (even the tiny amount of electricity given off by the

human

body) can trigger an immense explosion. Between 1900 and 1955 approximately a thousand severe dust explosions occurred in the United States, killing

650 people and destroying $90 million worth of property.

These dust explosions (triggered by the fineness of the dust and

its

content of volatile combustible matter) occurred at grain elevators, malt houses, thermal coal dryers,

woodworking

shops, and food processing

plants. Explosions also occurred in industries involved

with

fertilizers,

rubber, paper, sugar, cotton, pulverized coal, metals, plastics, and other

organic and inorganic materials.^

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

/

129

— Dust preoccupies industry

—

unburnable ash

at

Fly ash

level.

cover uranium from coal

experimenting with a means to re-

fly ash.)

Engineers constantly seek ways to

war

Produc-

in the effort.

endeavor to control minuscule dusts produced by me-

Computer chip manufacturers have

chanical friction and vibration. ried the

airborne bits of

now

and dispose of dust, even enlisting robots

tion engineers

—

sparks congressional hearings and requires technical

measurements. (Scientists are

collect

every

against dust

down

to the level

of single

car-

particles.

In the past few decades, dusts have been associated with air pollution, acid rain,

local matter

and radioactive

fallout.

They have gone from being

a

of factory safety to an issue of regional and even global

environmental protection. Radioactive dusts awaken the most dramatic concerns. In the

wake of

the

Chernobyl

disaster, scientists across

Eu-

rope sought to measure the contaminating particles spewed out by the nuclear

meltdown

in

These new dusts

Ukraine.

—though

occasionally benign and even useful

have in the main become an enemy of

life.

the absence of vegetation, and sterile soils.

deforestation and desertification. structive development.*^

Dust

to threaten the biosphere

Even

the

It

in its

It

Dust represents erosion, can be taken as proof of

can be considered evidence of de-

most pernicious forms

is

thought

itself.

dimmest souls have come

to recognize truth in the

prop-

osition that the smallest things can be the Achilles' heel of the greatest society.

For most people today, tiny

particles cast a greater

over

this earthly

garden than threats from the heavens. The

imal

commands

attention.

Be they dust

shadow infinites-

particles, viruses, or errant

protons, these enemies have forced us to stretch our imagination and

130

/

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

— invent technologies with which to control them. Everything this civilization values

unseen

—

order, pleasure, and health

—

requires mastery of these

entities.

SCIENCE ACHIEVES GREATER CONTROL OF THE SMALL World War

accelerated the progress of science and technology into

II

the microcosm. Scientists and technologists played tag with one another in their search for microscopic control.

theories, they defined a

With mathematics and myriad

new microcosm. With

the evolution from

me-

chanical and electromechanical systems to electronics, miniaturization, digitalization,

and software, they produced ultraprecise machines that

allowed them to plumb the depths of reality.^ With fine cutting machines

and super-adhesives, they took things apart and put them together entirely

One

new

in

ways.^

crucial

component of this revolution was the

transistor,

which

vacuum

detects and amplifies electric impulses. Transistors replaced

tubes and have in turn been dramatically miniaturized and diversified

by microengineering. Today

millions of transistors can

nail-sized piece of semiconductor.

have become ever smaller and processor

can

now

—an

fit

on

Computers, dependent on

faster.

Their defining

a finger-

transistors,

unit, the

instrument originally composed of several transistors

comprise over a million transistors. Computers are but one

demonstration of the modern ability to make goods smaller,

more is

micro-

intricate,

and more useful

—and proof

that

power over

lighter,

the great

dependent on manipulation of microscopic materials and processes.

At

the center of this revolution lies not simply the discovery of new

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

/

131

materials but a

by

layer

newfound human

layer, electron

by

ability to design

electron. This ability, already displayed with

the invention of polymers,

became stunningly manifest with semicon-

ductor materials in the 1980s

when

Bell Laboratories,

tion of Frederico Capasso, developed a technique

beam

epitaxy,

atomic layer

which can "spray-paint

to

new

some, "akin to the

under the direc-

known

as molecular

a crystal into existence

technology, carrying out a revolution, according flaking of stone 2.5 million years ago or the

first

who

primitive metallurgists

first

smelted metal from rock ore 10,000

years ago" that can generate computer-designed materials to desires.'"

By

one

In the world of micro-architecture, such in-

at a time."'

ventions augur a

and make materials,

these lights, the periodic table

—which

fit

human

holds the key to

"every diamond, every superconductor, every three-five optoelectronic crystal,

every speck of dust, every biological

ever was,

is

or will be"

—

is

like a

tissue,

every material that

piano here for us to play."

At the beginning of the century, atomic theory and electricity constructed

the mastery of

pathways into the atomic and subatomic depths.

Telegraph, telephone, and radio offered evidence of the ability to com-

mand

invisible currents.

were perceived

War

I,

as a

No

means

Marie Curie used

shrapnel fragments.)

sooner were

to penetrate the

X

rays discovered than they

human body. (During World

X rays on French soldiers to locate embedded

PET

scanning, ultrasound, magnetic resonance

imaging, and other noninvasive diagnostic and treatment techniques

have opened the door wider. Doctors cure with machines that see what no

now commonly

human eye

can.

Seeking to penetrate the secrets of matter and energy, technologists

132

/

made

the invisible their subject.

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

diagnose and

scientists

They explored

and

the entire

electromagnetic spectrum.'^ Radiation studies led specifically to the dis-

covery and application of microwaves. Useful not

microwaves ator

—

—

just for

cooking,

generated by an electronic wave amplifier and acceler-

are essential to radar, long-distance telephone communication,

broadcast and cable television, and radiotherapy apparatus.'^ Particle radiation

—

the alpha and beta rays in radioactivity and other kinds of

rays from atomic and subatomic particles

—

is

integral to the use of

radiotherapy, photoelectric cells, and electronic eyes.

Contemporary

scientists

have supplemented

ma-

their eyesight with

chines that receive, measure, and record waves and pulses far too fast

and

human eye

fine for the

begun

to capture

were used

to detect.

and control

to capture

Of

course, science had already

light in the nineteenth century.

Cameras

images the human eye could not record; radi-

ometers were used to detect and measure radiation; and light meters, called interferometers, used light

waves

to

measure both

interstellar

—

the limit of

distances and things as small as a half of a light

measurement with

visible

wave

light.'''

Twentieth-century science and technology probed the depths of the microcosm. better light

The

New

particle

into

microscopes threw a

on experimental subjects than Leeuwenhoek's best

traditional

far

lenses.

microscope magnified objects by up to two thousand

times; the electron microscope, using a

magnify an object approximately

moving beam of electrons, can

a million times.

"lenses" to deflect electrons in the same light rays,

much deeper

way

Using magnetic

that glass lenses

bend

one type of electron microscope passes electrons through an

object, while another

bounces them off the object to create an image

The scanning

tunneling microscope (STM), invented in 1981,

of

it.'^

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

/

13}

map of the

creates "a miniature topographic

of

atoms. "'^

from the

Atomic force microscopes, invented

in 1985, use electrons

of a splinter of a diamond to explore the surface of indi-

tip

vidual atoms.'^ at the

and valleys of arrays

hills

Most

recently, the positron microscope, created in 1987

University of Michigan, uses isotopes such as sodium-22 to mea-

sure yet

more

finely the

world of atoms. At accelerating

rates, the

microcosm has been breached, observed, and controlled. Our theory and machines have taken hold of what our eyes cannot directly see or our hands touch.

As

physics defined one portion of the microcosm, biology provided a

new

lexicon of small living things.

case of

all,

To

take perhaps the most important

the 1953 discovery of the structure of

nucleic acid) proved an essential step in learning themselves.'* sible to

resulting

examine the genes

describe a ual),

The

genome

DNA

how

(deoxyribo-

genes replicate

growth of molecular genetics made

in the

chromosomes of different

it

pos-

species and

(the complete set of genetic material in an individ-

which opens the door

to cloning animals

and humans. Dolly, a

sheep cloned from a six-year-old ewe to create a genetically identical lamb, was welcomed into the world on February 24, 1997- Dolly occasioned a giant hubbub in which experts and laypeople were invited to debate the consequences of

human manipulation of

nature's

most

hidden, intimate, and tiny parts."

Cloning, which can be understood as the essence of miniaturization

and manipulation of life, challenges our values and stimulates our imaginations as

little

else.

In one sense, cloning, defined as the asexual

reproduction of the nucleus of a

134

/

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

cell

from the body of

a single parent,

DNA

is

as old as horticultural cutting

and grafting,

or, in nature, the asexual

reproduction of organisms such as bacteria. In the contemporary sense, it

connotes replication by genetic manipulation. In

this sense, the clon-

ing of Dolly, which captured the world's attention, surpassed

all

pre-

vious forms of cloning, which were predicated on the use of chromo-

somes from embryos or juveniles rather than from adult organisms. Dolly was generated from a specialized adult genetic copy

The

—

a clone

—

cell,

making her an exact

of her mother.^"

cloning of Dolly raises the question of whether

human

control

over the invisible will lead to genetic self-engineering. The ongoing

Human Genome

Project, a major scientific effort to

on every human chromosome, opens up the mote, of humans shopping for their year project

—which —

ahead of schedule itself will

be

map

all

possibility, albeit

own kind. At the end

unlike most large endeavors

is

of this

can

still

re-

fifteen-

proceeding well

for better or worse, the blueprint of

visible to humanity. Science

the genes

human

life

now command what

a

few decades ago people could not even imagine.^'

Today

the manipulation of the living and nonliving small proceeds

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

/

135

— at a

Human

staggering rate.

perplexing microuniverses.

harnessing lions of

fleas to

imagination

Once upon

miniature cannons.

which could

ride bareback

dragged into tangled and

is

Now bacteria

and optic

(in 1972)

gobble up

up cyanide

The

fibers.

first

oil spills

in streams

to

by

millions and mil-

flea

—

more

serve

of fer-

produce pharmaceu-

microbes patented in the United States

around the world. Today bacteria clean

and make enzymes for snipping

step in genetic engineering.

itself

their age-old tasks

menting beer and wine, but they are also used ticals

—

on the smallest

They not only continue

utilitarian purposes.

amused

a time royalty

An American bug bank

DNA,

a

first

keeps a stock of

55,000 frozen cell cultures for future work.^^

Medicine has been part of

this redefinition

of the small. Utilizing

ever subtler techniques, instruments, and laboratories, into

even more intimate relationships with the

Allergists at

details

it

of

has entered

human

life.

have entered the bedroom and pointed an accusing finger not

mites (the tiniest of

known

spiders) but at their wastes as the

most

insidious causes of allergies and asthma.

Medicine inventories people's environments. lens {pollen

means dust

grains could

fit

in Latin),

on the head of

showing

It

counts the finest pol-

that ten

thousand pollen

a pin. (Certain pollens are so "tiny

uniform they have been used to

calibrate instruments that

and

measure

in

the thousandths of an inch.")" Pharmacologists' subtlest creations

which

still

involve such timeless tools as pestle and mortar and such

perennial acts as crushing and mixing

—have gone

minds, altering their moods, pleasures, and particles, lithium

clear

136

/

—

the lightest

bombs, ceramics, and

known

Ground

into

minute

metal, also used in thermonu-

optical glass

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

lives.

right to people's

—was

first

widely prescribed

— a

for manic-depressive illness in the early 1970s.

Now

it

helps hundreds

of thousands of people live normal lives (though not without side fects).

Prozac,

emerged

commonly administered

in the 1990s as

as a

drug, patient, doctor, and society.

what the

finest grains

and body, and

at

what

in

a

capsule,

an immensely popular and controversial drug

for the treatment of depression. Pills create a

among

powder

ef-

four-way conversation

The conversation

centers

on

imaginable can do to ease the suffering of mind cost.

Other sciences also consider minuscule things. Geologists measure mountains and seas by the accumulation of sediments of the Paleontologists scan the micrographs of four conodonts

have been the closest living invertebrate

mounted on

human

of

finest clays.

—which may

of vertebrates

relative

a pinhead in a debate over the origins of that species

life itself.^"

Palynologists

—

pollen experts

—

and

use the nearly

indestructible shells of pollen to determine continental drift, the ad-

vance and retreat of fall

ice ages, the

formation of seas, and the

rise

of mountains.^^ Prehistoric termites trapped in amber yield

twenty-five million years

and

DNA

old.^*^

In Germany, radioastronomers take the search for the small to the

universe at large.

They

the origins of

The Cologne

that

it

life.

scan space for molecules that might indicate radiotelescope they use "is so sensitive

could register the spectral lines of a candle burning on the

moon." More impressive,

become dark clouds near

it

identifies spectral lines

the heart of the Milky

from "photons

Way

that

25,000 light-years

away." While they have not yet confirmed the theoretical assumption that

90 percent of the

total

mass of the universe

space between visible galaxies

—

is

located in invisible

the great hidden dust of things

—

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

/

137

Termite in amber

German radioastronomer 1992

when he concluded

cules of the

that "in

On

lion light-years

the basis of

away and

as

to

and

invisible things.

be either o or

i),

Or perhaps

more powerful

—

it is

plumb

/

—

as

and sug-

on

earth.^^

does our age's overall concern

to recognition

of the presence of small single switches (set

intricate functions to chart

the unseen depths of the earth, or design

The more powerful the other

way

the machine, the smaller

around: the smaller

its

its

parts, the

the machine. In this world of computers, intricacy

means nearly everything.

138

invisible

consist of particles never seen

computers carry out

the wings of a plane. parts.

is

With an immense number of

the path of a spaceship,

more

massive as 500 billion suns, the Roentgen

may

statistics

stars

X-ray pictures of three galaxies 150 mil-

The computer adds profoundly for calculation

poetic in

probability the atoms and mole-

confirmed that 99 percent of the universe

gests that 90 percent of it

and

all

waxed

whole of mankind have passed through other

than once.""

satellite

associated with the project

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

Practicing molecular engineering and offering the

dream of atomic

engineering, nanotechnology encompasses several sciences, including chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, and materials science. practitioners

work

in

dimensions smaller than the wavelength of light

(loo nanometers, or io~' meter), inspecting viruses (lo

(2—3 nm).

Its

Some of the

a trillionth of a second.

materials they

One

work with can survive

impetus for their work

new compounds

chemistry, which adds half a million

nm) and

is

DNA

for only

contemporary

each year to an

estimated twelve million specific molecular compounds.^^ Fueling their

imagination

is

the

work of molecular

scientists,

who, building from the

bottom up, have produced such novel materials lon,

as nylon,

Tyvek, Tef-

and superglue, and micromachinists, who, "after creating the

transistor in 1948, learned to build logic

first

and computation machines

with micron-scale components, thereby generating a global industry

second only to

These assertion:

because

agriculture."^''

scientists'

work

lends weight to Alfred North Whitehead's

"The reason we

we have

are

—depend on

a greatly

—

a higher imaginative level

but because

finer imagination,

ments."^' Their achievements

ence

on

like so

enhanced

we have

is

better instru-

much of contemporary

ability to

not

sci-

measure things. After

barely twenty years of existence, atomic and molecular detectors and sensors operate

drunk

drivers,

much of our

world, alerting us to smoke, identifying

opening and closing doors, and reading and copying

our writings and markings. The scientists the ability to

combine

of these machines also give

finest

spatial resolution

with tunneling mi-

croscopy and the time resolution of ultrafast optics. Together they yield a powerful tool for the investigation of

dynamic atomic phenomena,

allowing the close tracking of molecular reactions. Although reliable

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

/

139

engineering and manufacturing techniques have yet to be developed, these innovations point the

way

new

to

orders of materials with unique

physical properties.^^

Richard Feynman of Room

at the

—whose

visionary 1959 lecture "There's Plenty

Bottom" opened

a

that the possibility of "arranging

them" would

door

nanotechnology

to

—

speculated

atoms one by one the way we want

create the potential for atomic-scale assembly of machines

and ultraminiaturized computers." Nanotechnology has evolved

compass not only computational devices but

to en-

also tiny mechanical de-

vices equipped with micron-sized bearings, gears, cams, and clutches.

Among enthusiasts'

projections are

immunity machines

that "could de-

stroy viruses roaming the bloodstream. Inside these robots tiny gears

no bigger than

Ultrafine technology

examples).

a protein molecule."^'*

means

ultrafine

Beams of light replaced

dard measures.

From

would reside

lines

measurement

on dense

(see table

i

for

alloys to define stan-

1945 to 1950, adding further precision to light

measurements, the U.S. Bureau of Standards developed improved length standards using light from mercury- 198, an isotope formed by

transmuting atoms of gold in nuclear reactors.^^ Precision has increasingly depended on radiation.^'^

Even

in the late twentieth century,

ence's finest units of measure.

most people are ignorant of sci-

Everyone

amid the products and processes

in the

that these fine

West, however, lives

measures make possible.

Automobiles, appliances, and workplace machinery run on computer chips and are manufactured to

more and more

precise tolerances.

Households have sensors and automatic devices of all heat and humidity, to turn lights

140

/

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

on and

off, to

sorts to regulate

supply water, to run

TABLE I. MEASURES OF THE MICROCOSM Length (meters)

Description 1

meter (m)

1

7X10-'

length, cat 1

10"^

centimeter (cm)

7X10"^

length, small insect 1

millimeter

10-'

(mm) hair

8X10-5

lower limit of vision,

4X10-5

diameter,

human

unaided red blood

human eye

7X10"^

cell

chromosome 1

IQ-'^ 10"'^

micron (m)

small bacterium

.

virus 1

2X10"^ io-» 10-'

nanometer (nm)

diameter, atoms

1-2 XIO-'"

1

angstrom (A)

10-10

1

picometer

10-'^ 10-'^

diameter, atomic nucleus 1

femtometer

io-'5

Adapted from Herbert Klein, The Science ofMeasurement: Historical Survey

(New

York:

Dover

A

Publications, 1974),

191-92.

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

/

141

sump pumps,

to operate timers, to

warn of

In the near future, liouses will function

computer linked

to the telephone

and

fires,

and to detect radon.

by remote control using

a

television. Control, increasingly

hidden below and within, will become ever

less visible,

ever more

commanding. Peoples of the developed world have willingly delivered themselves into the

hands of the manufactured unseen. Our dependence has been

the consequence of a succession of revolutions.

and industrial revolutions were the

first;

tronic revolution have driven us on.

The

agricultural, urban,

the electric and

The amount of

now

the elec-

time between

successive revolutions has declined dramatically, and our reliance

on

unseen things has grown proportionally. The buttons on our radios and televisions, the timers

shots

—

on our stoves and furnaces, our

these things and

more make command of the

children's allergy

small a

common

presumption. More and more, our surroundings are invisibly administered

and illuminated

to

our

taste.

This desire to organize, regulate, and manipulate the minute and

unseen has already spread to the Boris Yeltsin

first

rest

of the world. Russian president

consulted with America's most prominent heart sur-

geon before undergoing

a

coronary bypass. Saintly Mother Teresa of

India received the most sophisticated medical care possible. Control of

our world, especially

when

it

comes

to well-being,

is

an emulated West-

ern good, and more than anything else accounts for Western material

and perceived cultural

142

/

superiority.

LIGHTING UP THE MICROCOSM

X.H

AFTER EIGHT

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS The over

planet its

is

nothing but a crazy quilt of micro soups scattered

196,93 8, 8oo-square-mile surface.

see them, or sense their presence in

We,

all

as individuals, can't

any useful manner. The most

sophisticated of their species have the ability to outwit or manipulate

the one microbial sensing system

—

system.

In the 1990s,

we

Homo

sapiens possess: our

immune

Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague

can see that for each disease conquered, another

has emerged or reemerged. Scores of infections have shattered the

dream of

a sanitary Utopia.

—Arno However Edenic

Man

minated, and exactly calibrated it.

He

still

it

has

and Microbes

—however become —

human environment

the

been expelled from

Karlen,

dust-free, illu-

the serpent has not

has legions of tiny

allies,

though these

cannot be, as they once were, wrapped up in a package called Misery

and Fate and accepted as

life's

emies are unique. Each has

own

its

unalterable conditions. These fresh en-

own name and

a capacity to cause its

kind of fear and dread. Medusa-headed cancer, for example, meta-

stasizes differently in

each person's imagination. (One person sees the

sun's ultraviolet rays piercing the

Another sees

his uncle

to lurk in air, water,

ozone layer and corrupting skin

cells.

dying of lung cancer.) Poisons that are suspected

and food

strike terror in the hearts

of many. Visions

143

of cholesterol, accumulating on artery walls and breaking loose floes in a river until

it

dams up

the heart,

make

like ice

the counting of calories

an ominous self-audit of the accreting death from within. Society

now

carefully

weighs

little

the small and invisible can hurt and the basement, in the

things. Incrementally, cryptically,

kill.

bedroom, and

They

at the

threaten at the table, in

water

Danger

tap.

lurks

wherever knowledge and imagination can reach. Fears of drugs, poisons, viruses, radiation, and hundreds of chemicals accumulate in con-

temporary people.

We

home

are not at

in the

garden of our

own

making.

Among the many new enemies

are dusts.

Complex and

multifarious,

they attack the earth. In 1962, Rachel Carson called attention to a

new

order of dreadful dusts in Silent Spring. She described the deadly effect

of pesticides like

DDT

on

the natural environment. Promising to free

crops from dreaded insects, these pesticides had poisoned the food chain,

from the smallest bacteria

to the largest

While the masses packed the moviehouses

mammals. to entertain themselves

with fabricated fears of bug-laden asteroids and extraterrestrial alien spores,

Carson enumerated truly

two hundred States,

insecticides

and another

five

lethal earthly enemies.

Approximately

and herbicides were produced

in the

hundred were annually finding

their

United

way

to

U.S. markets. Cumulatively, they were destroying the foundation of life itself,

Carson charged. Drawing a

clear contamination

—

particularly

parallel

from strontium-90, which had

cently been discovered to collect in the milk of ers

— Carson argued

rates in animal

144

/

that pesticides

and plant

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

tissue.

between them and nu-

cows and human moth-

were accumulating

They

re-

at significant

penetrated cells and "shattered

or altered the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends."'

Delivered in liquid and dry forms, these invisible

wherever they were nonselectively applied. "In

less

killers collected

than two decades,"

Carson wrote, "they have been thoroughly distributed throughout the world and they occur virtually everywhere. in fish in

remote

eggs of birds

lakes, in

— and

in

merely to poison but

and change them

man

.

.

.

They have been found

earthworms burrowing

They have "immense power not

himself."

to enter into the

in sinister

in the soil, in the

most

vital

processes of the

body

and deadly ways."^ They can destroy en-

zymes, block the process by which the body receives

its

energy, prevent

organs from functioning, cause cancer, and precipitate genetic mutations.

Carson, whose work rested on an emerging ecological science, told the story of these hidden lethal processes with powerful images

around the world of scorched lands, in

sively"

—

and animals dying

sterilized waters,

swarms. She quoted Rene Dubos

—

from

they "creep on [men] unobtru-

to describe these invisible enemies. In "the ecology of the

world within our bodies," she wrote, "minute causes produce mighty effects ... a

change

at

one point,

in a single

molecule even,

may

re-

verberate throughout the entire system to initiate changes in seemingly unrelated organs and tissues."^ These changes

"as a chemical factory," denying the

body

may

the very

destroy the

oxygen

it

cells

needs to

live.

Carson pointed out that many of these chemicals are mutagens: they alter

chromosomes and

into monsters.

cells.

They

carry the potential to turn the living

For Carson, the serpent was a human creation, not a

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

/

145

fallen angel: the science that

had brought many unseen pathogenic

organisms under control had also created,

at the

molecular

level, a

carcinogenic society/

Carson's apocalyptic vision portrays the nemesis of the minute as a

response to

human conquest of

Carson noted

invites catastrophe.

beneficial insects

the small.

command

The

fate

pesticides while deadlier,

of chemical society, in which

humanity had placed such hope, would turn on errant molecules, and so those

hubris of

that across the globe thousands of

were being destroyed by

chemical-resistant pests emerged.

The

who

lived

its

most perverse and

by poison would

perish

by

poison.

AN ECOLOGICAL VISION OF THE MICROCOSM Carson's role was to define the ethical and the metaphorical parameters

of an ecological vision of the earth. She preached the need for humans to live in as she

harmony with

understood

it,

the tiniest parts of the natural order. Nature,

could no longer be conceived of as observable to

humans. Rather, much of what was most important about nature was hidden from

no

link

sight.

Nothing was too

petite to

be part of Carson's zoo;

between the organic and inorganic was too subtle or cryptic

to

be explored.

This ecological view pushes human imagination to care about everything on the planet. for

all

living things

An awe of life not dissimilar to the Hindu reverence is its

emotional kernel. In

a place in the eternal flux; everything star shines in the smallest ripple

this view, all things

depends on everything

have

else; the

of water.

Carson's ecology constituted a fresh perception of the small and the

[46

/

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

which took form and became popular

invisible, It

was

by

chillingly justified

events, foremost

in the 1970s

among them

and 1980s.

the

War. The war formed a stage on which the world's strongest

Vietnam

industrial,

nuclear, and chemical power, the United States, acted out the part of a sinister poisoner of nature.

The

ons and defoliants made

along with

appear an

enemy of life

it,

right

country's use of antipersonnel weap-

down

its

chemical-based industries,

and molecule.

to the level of cell

Other events reinforced the developing ecological view and derstanding of the unseen. In the late 1960s,

Ground

in

Utah, the U.S.

sheep with nerve gas.

Army

Many who

at

its

un-

Dugway Proving

accidentally killed several thousand

read of the event, no matter

how

great their outrage, sensed that the powers of the era had transformed

them, too, into innocent lambs being led to slaughter by the

of the poison gas race

—

it

News

the most sinister and concealed element of the

— awakened memories

the Jews, and

state.

of World

War

I

arms

and the Nazi gassing of

exacerbated current fears that technological civilization

would poison everything. The

public's dread of nerve gas has

been

kept alive by the revelations of disarmament negotiations, chemical accidents like the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, the Soviet use of

poisonous gases in the

in Afghanistan,

and the

terrorist use

of poison gases

Tokyo subway.

Other events of the past three decades have driven the human imagination microscopically inward and

downward. Oil

regular accusations that contemporary society

is

spills

have produced

poisoning the earth,

drop by black drop. Single acts of pollution have been taken to be revelatory of self-poisoning.

Groundwater has been declared contam-

inated, rivers polluted, lakes acidified,

and seas atrophied. Animals of

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

/

147

all

sizes

and types

—from whales

clared endangered.

lands

Whole

to

regions

whooping cranes

—

—have been pronounced dead

—have been

de-

and wet-

forests, deserts, prairies,

or in danger of extinction. Reve-

of toxic and nuclear waste dumps have created powerful images

lations

of a nation covered with wounds from which rivers of lethal, invisible chemicals ooze.

As water and lution

soil

pollution invisibly

menaced from below,

air pol-

menaced from above. In 1858 London experienced what became

known

Great Stink. So

as the

that Parliament

ground

much sewage flowed

to a halt

into the

Thames

The

incident

because of the stench.

helped precipitate a national cleanup. In 1952 four thousand deaths were

London's "pea-soup"

attributed to

1970s did

air

pollution

nized menace.

Smog

—known

Responding

to the

But only

smog

were forbidden

emerging

in the late 1960s

—become

warned people with

alerts

stay indoors, and children

as

fog.^

to

allergies

and asthma

range of chemical particles and a complex

dusts.*^

set

to

to play.

plunged ahead

study of aerosols, which are essentially atmospheric tified a

a globally recog-

go outside

crisis, scientists

and

in their

They

iden-

of chemical re-

actions that contributed to pollution of the atmosphere. Aerosols range in size

from coarse natural

particles emitted

to fine synthetic particles created

Many of

by volcanoes and

sea plants

by high-temperature combustion.^

these unseen particles react chemically to form legions of

invisible enemies,

harming

Public concern about

sensitive ecosystems.^

soil,

water, and air pollution led to government

regulation of industrial emissions. Capturing, filtering, and testing for particulates a skill

[48

/

became occupational

specialties. Pollution control

and engendered a federal agency as well as many

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

became

state agencies.

government banned aerosol spray cans containing

In 1978 the U.S.

chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were understood to destroy the

ozone layer that protects

(From 1973

to 1985 the

life

on earth from the

number of

skin cancer deaths increased

The popular imagination was

percent.)'

told that a squirt of a

sun's ultraviolet rays.

stretched

But people were also asked

that industrial

form

a layer of par-

heat in the atmosphere, causing global warming, which,

in turn, could cause global flooding

caps.

when people were

morning deodorant or hairspray could damage

the atmosphere and that carbon dioxide emissions ticles that traps

by 26

from the melting of the polar

to consider the opposite possibility:

and agricultural emissions might form a screen

canic dusts have in the past

—

that

ing the atmosphere and causing a

ice

would block out

new

ice age.

—

as vol-

sunlight, thus cool-

Only

the

most obtuse

missed the main message: humans risked so distorting the natural order that they

were sentencing themselves to be destroyed by

frost or fur-

nace.

Spurred by the fear of environmental degradation, disciplines

and government agencies sprang up

in the

new academic United

States.

'°

In 1963 the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Acf. In 1970 the gov-

ernment formed the Environmental Protection Agency. The sion of the Clean suit.

Having long ago turned

most of its its

Water Act passed Congress

wildlife,

its

in 1972.

first

ver-

Europe followed

rivers into polluted canals, eliminated

and surrendered

to the automobile,

Europe, led by

youth, enthusiastically formed Green parties, whose popularity

crested in the 1980s.

The

ecological

The West

agreed:

view was shared by

little

things are big things.

ecologists, environmentalists,

animal rights proponents, alternative energy adherents, and population-

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

/

149

control advocates.

Not without

to earlier traditionalists

who

sought to defend "authentic" peasant ways

ways of

against the artificial

ideological and emotional similarities

the city, this novel breed of ecologists

(coming almost uniformly from the educated middle and upper shared a terrifying vision of microscopic insufficient capacity to digest all

outstripped nature's

own

our wastes.

last

the toxic detritus of

A

on Earth. Nature had

Artificial

human pollutants

solvents and cleaners. In a stunning reversal

of the Western view of the small, seen as nature's

life

classes)

defenders.

human

insects,

They

alone,

worms, and it

bacteria

were

seemed, could dispose of

society.

NEW GRID ON THE UNSEEN

The

ecological view of the small superimposed itself

just as

germ theory had superimposed

itself

on germ theory,

on the theory of vapors.

Postulating the fundamental significance of molecular processes and

microorganisms, together ecology and germ theory gave

rise to

an

epidemiological surveillance that extended across the whole sphere of

organic matter. In contrast to

germ

theory, however, the ecological

the natural with the good. that these

new-wave

Those

raised

view equated

on germ theory complained

ecologists courted a return to

filth,

disease,

and

germs. Beneficiaries of national public health regimens, and a generation or

two removed from experience with epidemics of killing diseases,

many of

the

younger adherents of what came loosely

to

be called the

ecology movement rejected the personal health disciplines on which they had been raised.

150

/

They condemned

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

pesticides.

The extreme among

them turned up

their noses at synthetic cleansers, and, heedless to the

noses of others, they spurned

artificial

deodorants and soaps.

fhished their toilets less frequently to save water.

both naively and ostentatiously

—

as if they

They

acted

were immune

They

—

often

to the dis-

eases the preceding generation had so profoundly struggled against.

Parades of dirty and accusatorial youth marched righteously under the

banner of getting back to nature. They

them and welcomed

dirt

and

let

things creep and crawl about

dust. Oblivious to the diseases

of

earlier

years, they judged unseen nature to be innocent.

Independent of the extreme practices and ideas of

its

most zealous

adherents, the ecological view rested on a profound reordering of the

microcosm. Redefining contamination,

it

produced new taboos.

termined what was polluted and not polluted

in a

new way.

It

de-

Its first

demarcation was between the organic and inorganic, the natural and the synthetic, the pure and the

artificial. If a

product was "natural,"

it

not only was healthy for the body but also put the user spiritually in tune with the ecosphere.

The most

fervent beliefs in the ecological view produced devout

observances in everyday rates believers

from

life.

As

sin,

however

slight

their god, so acts of polluting,

and

subtle, sepa-

however small, were

understood to separate people from the cosmic order, which joins each living creature to every other living creature

and manure

many

sects

ate berries

pile.

Like a

fertile religion,

and followers.

and honey.

Its

—

ant and elephant, flower

the ecological

monks withdrew

to the

view spawned mountains and

A vast number of faithful suburban middle-class

believers adopted organic diets, drove their small cars less frequently,

and talked about

invisible,

omnipresent carcinogens the

way

peasants

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

/

151

once talked about the weather. They earnestly sought a natural, pure Hfe.

The

core of this faith was purity, and

cern for small things. Like

all

everyday

cosmic companionship with others it

a perfect miniature

required a meticulous con-

great belief systems,

to classify the smallest things of

calling for reform,

it

life

it

allowed believers

while offering a sense of

(in this case, all living things).

While

offered the ecstatic view that the details of life are

cosmos worthy of adulation. This view squared

well with the vague pacifism of the younger generation in the United States

and Europe while clashing sharply with the

generation proud of the battles

it

beliefs

of an older

had fought against seen and unseen

threats to the nation's well-being.

Of

course, the ecological sensibility did not escape a fundamental

paradox: though humans should care for nature, nature does not always care about them.

THE SNAKE RESURFACES The demarcations of gists

the small

and the

invisible

made by

the ecolo-

of the 1960s and 1970s blended with concerns about radioactive

contamination. Radioactivity kept people mindful of invisible threats.

The 1979

As always, events

instructed imagination.

Mile Island,

with threats of nuclear catastrophe, sounded the

rife

accident at Three

death knell for the expansion of nuclear energy in the United States.

The

actual

much of fiarther

meltdown

at

Chernobyl

in 1988

spewed radioactivity over

eastern and northern Europe, sparking a universal call for

study of the effects of radiation on

human

cells."

The

first

phases of Soviet and American disarmament, in tandem with the

152

/

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

— emergence of nuclear programs

Iraq and North Korea, raised

in

questions about the most lethal black market of

all:

nuclear materials.

International protests against the resumption of nuclear testing

French in the Pacific demonstrated the

vitality

by

the

of public fears of sub-

atomic particles.

Antennae

for the invisible

almost everything

we

have grown on nearly every head as

eat, drink,

and breathe has been judged carcin-

ogenic. Science courts have sprung up across the nation to settle debates

about the disposal of radioactive dusts and other toxic materials. Health education has taught people that exposure to even the most minuscule quantities of certain toxins can kill

ing learned to measure icine,

As

new

safe as

feel

—

the

especially

middle

classes

—

has

lexicon of millesimal hopes and fears.

contemporary urban dwellers are

lives are contrasted still

beings by the millions. Hav-

well-being in milligrams of food and med-

whole population

the

adopted a

its

human

—

especially

when

with those of their dusty peasant ancestors

their

—

they

menaced by minuscule enemies. As each generation removes

one layer of worries,

it

discovers another.

Today

the

media and gov-

ernments caution the vulnerable public about chemical products, mi-

crowave ovens, and

allergens. Nutritionists

foods are poisoning them gram by gram. like dust

and worms

—have been

replaced

remind consumers that

The by

old, visible

enemies

stealthier enemies.

Whole

buildings have been judged "sick" because of asbestos in the walls or

other synthetic materials that poison the occupants.

ner exposes

"microbes

"The Toxic Workplace."

live

and breed

in

HVAC

ditioning] ducts."^^ "Sick building

A

magazine

A

newspaper ban-

article declares that

[heating, ventilation,

and

air

con-

syndrome" has become common

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

/

153

1990s parlance

by

— and workers

fear that they are being poisoned daily

their computers, cell phones, chairs,

and

carpets.

Indeed, since the 1960s, hordes of invisible enemies have gathered

on the horizon. Masses of people who have benefited more than anyone in the past

rejecting

from human control of the small have joined ecologists

in

conquest of nature. Arguments long made

civilization's

against Western materialism, capitalism, and imperialism have been steadily incorporated into the rhetoric of environmentalists ogists.

Given the

things Western,

era's escalating it

a short

is

and fashionable moralizing against

all

and chic step from indicting Western

society as the exploiter of native peoples to lator

and ecol-

condemning

it

as the vio-

of the biosphere.

This view of human beings' relationship with nature has undergone another twist in the past decade.

The

small

is

understood to be striking

back. In The Coming Plague, Laurie Garrett tantalizingly suggests that the reappearance of the plague into the

microcosm.

and bacteria lose

'^

the nemesis of progress's intrusion

As human populations grow and

their natural hosts

The hunter becomes

beings.

is

interact, viruses

and make use of available human

the hunted.

Microorganisms whose eradication was predicted by health organizations have adapted and survived. Killer diseases of yesteryear, resistant to the drugs that

once controlled them, are making a frightening

comeback. Syphilis, malaria, and measles once again terror.'''

increase. States.

Lyme

/

Rocky Mountain

Even

in the

cases of bubonic plague have been reported in States.

Tougher

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

strains

with

spotted fever are on the

Yellow fever and tuberculosis have reappeared

and the United

154

disease and

strike people

United

Vietnam

of disease have forced medicine

to assemble a fresh generation of drugs. Nations is

worry

that civiHzation

being beaten on the invisible battlefield of disease, where half a

century ago

New

it

stood as the victor.

diseases add

by the revelation fatal

new

that a

fears. In the

mid-1990s, Britain was rocked

form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob

brain disease, could apparently be contracted

disease).

BSE,

in turn,

was seemingly spread by the use of

feed containing the offal of sheep with scrapie, a disease that lieved not to affect other animals.

When

and

by eating meat from

infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or

cows

cow

disease, a rare

mad

cattle

was be-

the link between Creutzfeldt-

Jakob and BSE was acknowledged, more than a million cows were slaughtered and incinerated in Britain, and the British beef market collapsed. life

The

cause of this group of diseases

is

believed to be a prion, a

form even smaller and more enigmatic than viruses

affected

by conventional

sterilization techniques.'^

— and one un-

Another intimidating

micro-entity lurks in the garden. In thirty

Man

and Microbes^ Arno Karlen

new

diseases that have appeared since 1951.'^ In recent years in

offers a

of approximately

flu,

and Legionnaires'

Even more

terrifying, the vi-

the United States, toxic shock syndrome, swine disease have captured public attention.

list

cious African hemorrhagic fevers, Lassa, Marburg, and Ebola, have

appeared in the West.''

The

smallest living creatures can

undo

the

greatest.

Though

not as easily spread or instantly lethal as the

rhagic diseases, the

human immunodeficiency

virus has killed millions

and infected millions more around the world. Invisible manifest in

its

consequences,

it

new hemor-

in

its

nature,

has caused passionate moral debate. But

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

/

155

Human a

immunodeficiency viruses using

human

white blood cell as breeding

ground. Dots are budding viruses.

the truly insidious character of

human immune

plays on the

HIV

lies in

the microscopic tricks

system. Constantly changing

the virus stealthily enters the white blood cells encircle its

host

disease, lethal

and

kill trespassers.

fair

game

HIV

for

all

cells, it

of serpents in the garden of

It

is

to

leaves

More than any other

has compelled Western imagination to reopen

powers of the microcosm.

disguises,

whose function

Having crippled the white

opportunistic diseases.

its

it

itself to the

has proved to be the most stealthy

this generation's intimate pleasures.

Imagination (rarely a pure or keen instrument, and frequently rigidly fixed

on

by custom or fashion) struggles

the

newly perceived nemesis. Life

beyond by

We

to focus

invisible

is

its

metaphors and science

threatened from below and

enemies crueler than Lucretius's indifferent atoms.

have no choice but to continue

to trust science

control unseen entities, for the sweet garden, earth,

156

/

THE SNAKE STILL LURKS

and technology is

to

not yet secure.

.CO-KCIUSIOM-

WHO

WILL TREMBLE

AT THESE MARVELS? Small numbers count. ratio

A

small imbalance in the particle-antiparticle

of the early universe, for example, leads to a cosmos of 50

billion galaxies

A

and a habitable planet Earth.

small change in

cholesterol content can produce disproportionately large changes in cell

may

functioning. alter the

— David

flapping of a butterfly's

wing

in

South Asia

ensuing weather over San Francisco.

Toolan, "Praying in a Post-Einsteinian Universe"

Imagination. falsehood,

The

all

It is

the

the dominant faculty, master of error and

more deceptive

for being invariably so.

—

Blaise Pascal, Pensees

This century's dramatic encounter with the small and the invisible portends a significant cultural revolution. "For who," in the words of Pascal, "will not marvel that our body, a

moment ago

the universe, itself imperceptible in the

bosom of

now be

a colossus, a world, or rather a

ingness beyond our reach?"

imperceptible in

the whole, should

whole compared

Who, knowing

to the noth-

himself to exist between

"these two abysses of infinity and nothingness, will not tremble at these

marvels?"'

The

nineteenth century was about colossal things: large visions,

immense undertakings, and sublime

buildings.

It

founded profitable

157

— industries, laid tracks across continents,

urban works transformed the country-

dirt,

and sand to the winds.

side

and turned peasants into national

though

it

Its

and opened vast acres of dust,

The

citizens.

inherited the nineteenth century's

twentieth century,

commitment

to large-scale

attention to ultrafine and microcosmic things.

It

has

not shuddered in awe before Pascal's second infinity of nothings.

It

has

projects, turned

its

treated the amplitudes of the minute as a wilderness to explore and

subjugate.

of the

has dwarfed old kingdoms of the small with

It

invisible. It has directed the

human eye downward.

Nothing has been too small or remote

No

to scrutinize.

worlds.

As

for twentieth-century science

sooner had atom and molecule,

defined than they were

new worlds

made gateways

cell

and microbe been

into countless other miniature

they were pulling apart an endless set of Russian dolls

if

within dolls, twentieth-century science and technology kept locating infinities

within the finitude. Their findings reproduced

than ethics,

seemed

politics,

and

no bottom

to be

common

to things.

at rates faster

sense could comprehend. There

Those who peer down continue

to

experience vertigo.

The

twentieth century has reversed the dominant hierarchy of being.

Contradicting what had been assumed since classical times

and form emanate downward from on high

microcosm

is

of the great

At

is

—

the source and explanation of the

it

—

that being

has argued that the

macrocosm. The truth

found in the small.

the start of this century, the astronomer's

planets circling the sun

—

twirling around a nucleus.

model of the galaxy

furnished a model for the atom: electrons

Now,

at century's

end, the physics of the

heavens has been reduced to the science of particles. Tiny things have

158

/

CONCLUSION

become

intriguing, and the small keeps getting smaller.

been found to contain in pulses

and

particles

forces, which,

Atoms have

move

without mass,

and waves.

Earth, heavens, and seas have been explored. are scrutinized in detail.^

The human body

Animal and plant

life

(a principal territory for the

expansion of inquiry into the small and the unseen) has become whole continents worthy of

many

sciences.

The manipulation of

select

mol-

ecules forms the basis of entire industries.

As

science and technology have penetrated inward and

though

plain old dust, life

—

has lost

its

still

profoundly present

role as the

first

in life

—

downward,

especially rural

definition of the small.

Dust

no

is

longer presumed to constitute the surface of things. Smooth, often colorful,

and water-resistant synthetic surfaces make up our roads,

walls, floors,

and furniture covers. Asphalt and cement (admittedly

dusty to extract and make) have replaced

dirt,

sand, and gravel roads.

Bright lawns and gardens have replaced dusty yards and open spaces.

Dust no longer invisible.

constitutes a

boundary between the

visible

and the

Penetrated by tiny instruments and countless theories of the

microcosm, dust has become porous. Like other barriers to

light

and

knowledge, including skin and darkness, dust has been taken down.

much

powers, real and magical, have vanished,

as ogres,

Its

angels,

witches, and other invisible creatures have been pushed to the edges

of experience. cleaners of

all

A

sorts

phorical powers.

mortality of

all

target of laboratory analysis

It

on the other, dust has

on the one hand, and of

lost its ancient

and meta-

no longer declares the passage of time and the

living things;

it

does not conceal within

stuff of spontaneous generation;

nor does

it

itself the

instantly transform

magic

what

it

CONCLUSION

I

159

settles on.

of

its

The phrase "ashes

resonance, even

to ashes

truth

if its

and dust to dust" has

lost

much

stands.

still

BEYOND DUST The achievements of the

how

twentieth century bring us to the question of

people in the future will experience the small and imagine the

invisible.

Having

largely lost contact with the traditional order of the

small and the invisible,

themselves about

new

how will contemporary people think and express orders of the minuscule.'*

What

will

be

their

relationship to microworlds not even hypothesized today?

In the last century and a half, urban industrial society has lost contact

with an entire range of microscopic things that once defined the

environment and the prevailing sense of what was small. are shaped and regulated

by

abstract laws

human

Human

lives

and distant agencies. As

goods are mass manufactured, most Western people are removed from intimate crafts,

work with

they

work

materials. Except

less

and

less

sociated with sewing, pottery,

with the

fine objects

in

its

particularities

in hobbies or

and processes

woodworking, and even

world our ancestors once knew in

when engaged

agriculture.

and

as-

The

details arrives

homogenized wholes. Society has undergone a great cleanup.

existence, dust life,

and

its allies

are

now

and gestures associated with

Once

a given

of everyday

considered blemishes on the good

their presence (scratching, spitting,

nose picking) are judged rude. In today's world, only clean and refined things are welcome. Intrusive small things feet, flies

/

like

pimples and smelly

and mites, weeds and even pesticide molecules

matters for specialized treatment.

i6o

—

CONCL USION

—have become

of course, some rebels cleanup.

With

world created by the great

reject the sanitized

dirty clothes,

shaggy

hair,

and cabins

woods, they

in the

keep their distance from clean and orderly middle-class urban

wish to be pure by embracing dust and creation of a intellectuals

Bohemia and

artists

dirt,

not

have embraced

dirt

some

circles, usually identified

glorification of the basic

—

that

its

uncorrupted peasantry.

is

fundamental, enduring, and passionate

such attach-

left,

an ideology.

justified

which

number of

and dust to taunt the bour-

with the political

ments have provided an identity and

They

Ever since the

in nineteenth-century Paris, a certain

geoisie and affirm their ties to the earth and

In

artifice.

life.

The

artists'

dark, dirty, earthy, and hence

—

can be seen in the paintings

of Millet and Van Gogh, especially the thickly brushed and heavily trowelled paintings of the

latter.

Naturalists like Zola, with an eye for

the harsh and the sordid, voiced the

same longing

in a different

me-

dium. Artists are not alone in finding in a

no

world of speed,

community

efficiency, light,

visit to a cousin's

working up

farm, a

and untidiness

and cleanliness. Even those with

intellectual or aesthetic aspirations find

on Mississippi Mud" from time

in darkness

to time.

it

"a treat to beat their feet

The urge might amount

week of roughing

a sweat cutting firewood.

it

to a

in the wilderness, or

For a portion of each modern

generation, the dust and dirt of preceding generations vanish into an

aura of nostalgia.

Much of what underpins

ment's defense of the natural

munity

As

in

may

the environmental

move-

be a search for simplicity and com-

an increasingly complex age.

dust and dirt have been

and regulated

lives,

removed from the center of

synthetic

they have become the source of quaint metaphors

CONCL USION

I

i6i

much

such as "so

dust in a dust storm," "dust bunnies," "beggar's

As

velvet," and "slut's wool."

vermin have lost their

dust, chiggers,

lost their sting in the

and

all

sorts of irritating

human environment,

they have also

hold on language. Their places have been taken by the con-

temporary language of scientific discovery and technological invention. Chips,

phors that

fill

provide the meta-

everyday conversation. Insofar as people become the

words and metaphors they

use, are

new

people.-^

new mind

DNA

and bytes, bacteria, viruses, and

bits,

and, thus, a

The new microcosmic order

we

witnessing the formation of a

bids farewell to a world of images

fashioned out of things seen and touched.

undoes the language and

It

metaphors out of which imagination once constructed lime invisible realm and provides a ination. Indeed, with bodies

ulated

by an

artificial

new

a rich

and sub-

order of experience and imag-

swaddled in new comforts and senses stim-

world of sanitized surfaces, contemporary people

no longer imagine with much vividness or

elasticity the small

At

same time, they

invisible as presented

by

are preoccupied with

contemporary microentities on which

folklore and religion.

the

and

their

com-

fort

and survival depend. In short, contemporary people are married

to a

new microcosm

derstand,

is

which, though too diverse and profound to un-

too imposing and encompassing to ignore.

NEW EXPERIENCES, NEW PEOPLES, NEW MINDS Beginning

in the late nineteenth

ciety, fresh

selves

groups of people and new types of minds configured them-

around the notion that nothing

cleaned up.

162

/

century in Western technological so-

CONCL U SION

Through

the

first

in the

world was too small

to

be

half of this century, the great cleanup

— insisted not only

one

free of

on an orderly and dust-free environment but

germs and

toxins.

The underlying

also

on

material basis of this

unprecedented expectation was humble stuff such as water pipes,

pumps, and sewer

lines.

Cadres of public health crusaders, along with the institutions they conscripted into service, formed regiments intent on dominating the

microscopic. Passionate, even obsessed, they denounced the presence

of dust and germs in the most intimate quarters of

city, family,

and

In conjunction with the banishment of undesirable minutiae, a

new

body.

aesthetic arose.

With

the reins of control hidden in cables and pipes

below the ground, and in

communication

in wires threaded

closets, the

new

tion that people should see only

The new

aesthetic (from

aesthetic

was predicated on the no-

what they wished

which

a

to.

few hermits and many

sented) declared that the world need

not even at night!

through walls and gathered

artists dis-

no longer be dusty and dark

affirmed: Let light shine forth. Let there be color

It

everywhere. Let the world be a pleasant garden. Let every

woman

child be dressed in colorful clothing, as bright as a sunlit

flowers.

Of

course,

this aesthetic. It

rebellious

women

understood, as few

men

and

bank of

did, the cost of

required constant vigilance and exertion against the

and intrusive small.

Women, who

for

generations had

grasped that harmony and beauty require mastery of the petite and the particular,

found that their new households required knowledge of ma-

chines, medicines,

spots and stains.

and cleaning agents and the wizardry

to

remove

And as if maintaining a spotless home were not difficult

enough, society also

now demanded

artful self-beautification

of face

CONCL USION

I

163

and

The American housewife of the

figure.

of cleaning

—was equipped

to master the

worlds of

1940s and 1950s

—

the queen

with goods and bullied by social pressure

self

and home

none of her foremothers had

as

ever been asked to do. In this increasingly see-through world, dust and dirt stood out visibly.

The

clean

call to

responsibility for

it.

grew

What

stronger.

escaped this

Power over

new

the small

meant

conscience and breed of

cleaners hid in the wilderness of the unperceived.

The

children of these dust and

germ

fighters, true to their lineage,

never doubted that humans could and should control the small and

One branch

invisible.

how much human

never doubting logical order of live in intimate

second branch

of these children, the environmentalists, while

life,

intervention had distorted the eco-

held firm to the proposition that

harmony with

nature, even at the molecular level.

—who might be

passionately on eradicating

all

humans could

called the children of light

blemishes from

human

—

A

focused

experience. Their

hegemonic confidence has extended from the ordering of the microworld to eliminating

all

pain and suffering and removing every instance

of corruption and prejudice in the Augean stable of politics. Truly, they

belong to a

civilization that has

banished dust and

dirt.'

They

are the

ultimate heirs of the radical Enlightenment, which, acting with the force of the Industrial Revolution behind

world

to

match

realize that the

its

it,

would have

full

purified the

imagined perfection.^ These children of light do not

good depends more on pumps and pipes than on moral

preaching.

We

all

confess consanguinity with these two groups in our shared

belief that the small

164

/

CONCL U SION

and the

invisible can

be known and manipulated.

Medicine, more than anything, has forged the crucial link between

contemporary consciousness and the new

microcosm with seen.^

scientific

and technological

successful diagnosis and manipulation of the un-

its

Medicine has provided the language and metaphors of infection,

and germs.

disease,

netic resonance

It

has

common

made

terms.

X ray, It

has

practices everyday parlance as they

wellness. Continually holding out

angiogram,

made

become

CAT scan,

the most refined medical individuals' best

new hopes

hope

for health, comfort,

longevity, medicine has simultaneously fought lethal

and called attention to the dangers lurking

and mag-

in

for

and

new microenemies

everyday human

acts.

In the second half of this century, environmentalism further sensitized society to the

long

list

powers of the unseen. The movement warned of a

of invisible lethal enemies, including industrial wastes, toxic

pesticides,

and radioactive

dusts. Masters of molecular suspicion, en-

vironmentalists (not always inaccurately) hypothesized monsters hiding in all

human

undertakings.

sects, bacteria,

such as

The appearance of

resistant strains

of in-

and viruses, and the emergence of terrifying diseases

AIDS and

Ebola, have been interpreted as signs of nature's

vengeance. Public health, environmentalism, and ecology were not alone in teaching twentieth-century society about the importance of the small

and the

invisible.

Commonplace

inventions like the telephone and tele-

vision offered convincing proof of the

sensors open doors,

checkout counters, flights.

new

They

pop up

perfectly

set factories in

powers of the unseen.

browned

motion, and

toast,

initiate

Now

scan foods at

and cancel space

read the surfaces of atoms and design the molecules for

products. Machines have

become

the eyes and hands of contem-

CONCl U SION

I

165

porary industry, whose most innovative thinkers predict molecular machines on the basis of their "silicon dreams."*^ Virtual reality takes civilization a step further into an artificial world.

A

fruit

of contemporary

scientific

imagination,

human

human

activities,

computers,

when

ushers

human

beings

Already serving a range

into a computer-generated replica of reality.

of

it

perfected, portend involving

all

senses in their simulations and sealing the identity of humanity

and machine. Virtual reality

is

in tune

with a society in which children are tethered

to video games, laboratories are indispensable,

and computer-generated

from flying Piper Cubs

situations offer instruction for everything

docking space stations and fighting future smart wars. Virtual to the expectations of a

conforms

film, television,

more

world

CDs, and computers)

contact with representations of

people

who know more

lives

stuff of the

reality

to books,

legions of people already have life

than with

life itself. It fits

soils

a

and

culmination of a society whose

and minds are removed from direct contact with the

world

—

its

dust and dirt

refinement and manipulation of

A

which (thanks

about computers and screens than

rivers. Virtual reality is the logical

members'

in

to

—and

are constructed around the

human and

natural environments.

supporter of virtual reality holds out the hope that in the end

humanity's self-invented virtual

realities will

not cut us off from history,

"may

nature, and culture. Virtual reality, she optimistically argues,

function as a link from the technological manifestations of humanity

back in

doing

and

i66

/

to the

all,

world that technology has ostensibly supplanted.

so,

it

as part

CONCLUSION

may even

offer a

way

.

.

.

And

to imagine ourselves, technology

of the natural world."''

whether human control of topias have

microcosm

the

will, as the

lead to humanity's enslavement to

it,

an open question. However, the indisputable fact

own

its

is

worst dyscreations

is

that humanity, to

unprecedented and accelerating degrees, depends on knowledge of the

microworld and new orders of materials and

entities constructed

by

humans. The contemporary world increasingly turns on the human discovery, making, and control of the small and the invisible. Both the

sublime and the mundane are increasingly encrypted in codes, etched

on

chips, or deciphered

from

porary science and technology

mere

reflection

ognize,

is

its

know

that

in contact

what they

of the microscopic and atomic

see

reality.

with contem-

and touch

is

know his name and

a

Truth, they rec-

not found by gazing above but by looking below. Even

they do not or

DNA. Those

if

care not an iota for classical philosophy

was

consolations, they admit that Lucretius

turns on atoms. But they, unlike him, insist

we

correct: the

world

study and master the

course of these atoms.

IMAGINING What

A

NEW IMAGINATION growing control of the minuscule

are the consequences of the

by human

imagination.'^ Will the

dures, and products furnish a will constitute a

to exercise

new

new microcosmic

new

set

of images and metaphors that

imagination.'^ Will the

and develop

itself in rich

concepts, proce-

new

order lead imagination

and creative

ways.'*

Surely the tools, measures, products, and conceptions of contem-

porary science and technology are noticed even by the dullest imaginations. afresh.

They demand They

rely

on

conceptualizing the small and the invisible

abstract mathematics.

They

require syntheses

CONCL USION

I

167

across

many

fields.

Dissemination of fresh findings stimulates additional

creative research. All this suggests that the for

new forms of

The

new microcosm

imagination and, perhaps, a

new

accounts

imagination

itself.

proposition has already been affirmed that the revolution of the

small and the invisible has altered twentieth-century views of nature

and human beings' place relations with vast

in

it.

Science and technology have established

new kingdoms beyond

the

boundary of dust. They

have provided more than a theoretical staircase scent

—

into orders hidden

below the

familiar countryside reaching out

the surrounding terrain of

One no

senses.

—

a structured de-

They have

established a

from the human eye and hand into

germs and atoms.

longer passes beyond dust and darkness into encounters

with imaginary and fantastic creatures, as those of former ages did.

The "beyond"

terious voyage, death, intoxication, or spell It

was seen

to

— —was imagined

for the medieval imagination

be inhabited by the dead,

be

saints,

it

reached by a mysas life-size.

and other anthropo-

morphic and animal creatures. These beings were diminished by the extension of religious orthodoxy and political sovereignty. Their very habitat

was subsequendy destroyed by the transformation of the

and countryside

in the nineteenth century. In this century, science

technology have further domesticated the unseen, creating their

city

and

own

unique gatekeepers and guides into the worlds hidden below dust and darkness.

Schools, books, commerce, and media have peopled

nation with

new

entities.

Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster

fewer and fewer appearances.

wrappings

168

/

— must

CONCLUSION

human

UFOs

and ETs

—

imagi-

now make

clothed in scientific

press hard to find a place in minds captivated with

— wonders of the new microsciences and technologies. Science-

the real

fiction writers

and filmmakers are driven

nation with tales of genetic mutation,

Even

catastrophe.

the

of revolution ciety's sense

hygiene.

human

warfare, and ecological their con-

DNA.

traditional invisible entities in retreat, will science's

dominate the unknown

entities

germ

popular imagi-

huge monsters of Jurassic Park owe

ception to contemporary research on

With

to appeal to

It

is

in

human

under way, bringing with

of what

is lethal.

transforms

It

tiny

imagination.-^ Surely a kind

new

it

images.

It alters

so-

redefines bodies, gestures, and daily

— and grows

relations with dust

new

out of the transformation of

and darkness, as well as the entire realm of

the minuscule and the unseen.

This revolution gives a large part of scientific institutions

and

their experts.

human

Ordinary people,

with only rudimentary knowledge of atoms, learn to talk and pray furnish.

—

at least in part

—

is

negligible. It

anyway: purchasing new and better goods and concern for hygiene; and making occasional could

resist

effort

is

entering the tent of the

speak

language these experts

in the

amounts mainly

who

and computer chips,

cells,

For most people, the price of admission

microcosm

imagination over to

to this

to

newly assembled

doing what they do

services;

showing more

visits to a doctor.

new microworld, when

so

Who little

required to defeat pain and secure comfort.-^

LAST THINGS ABOUT LITTLE THINGS Will this transformation of the invisible (to ask

human

relationship to the small

our question for the

a revolution in imagination.''

I

would

last

time)

like to

come

answer

and the

to constitute this

question

CONCL USION

I

169

affirmatively. It

would be a

delight for the author of a

book on such

a

minute subject as dust to be able to make such a large announcement as the

emergence of

a

new

imagination. Unfortunately,

my

answer

is

equivocal.

There are several reasons why

microcosm with

it

—

—and

We

unique ways of imagining.

human

wants will not,

our body

fit

We

and moral and dramatic purposes. all

what

obvious

is

size, feelings, interests,

cannot escape making ourselves

Our fundamental emotions and

things big and small.

at least

First,

beings think and feel anthropomorphically.

shape our images of things to

the measure of

don't believe that the contemporary

the concepts, practices, and institutions associated

will create

but fundamental,

I

new and

over the long term, be inhibited by

subtle sciences.

Nothing

too great or too tiny for

is

human prayer

hearts and metaphors will not be bounded. this in a recent article,

"Praying

anthropomorphically connecting

or poetry.

David Toolan

in a Post-Einsteinian

human

Human

illustrates

Universe," by

beings' place in the universe

to the particles of the dust at the beginning of the universe:

Indeed, our connection and belonging

even define our

identities

cosmic evolution. "I

Upanishads

—

am

that,"

we

DNA,

the microbes that

swim

—

CONCL USION

in

yes

waiting on us to finish the cosmic

/

being

and seeded here on

gave us breathable atmosphere

170

now

can

ence to the cosmos, to strike a chord.

our

so deep that

without including

star dust, earth stuff, a

parts of the universe

lie

.

.

.

.

the whole sweep of

say with the literally

.

It's

make

a differ-

as if all the star dust in

cells,

the

of nature

symphony

Hindu

conceived in far-

this planet to

our all

.

we cannot

humble algae

—were

well.*

that

expectant,

— Second, for the sake of nothing

less

than Hfe

as recent psychological literature suggests

tions of reality glasses.'

—

human

beings-

close off considerable por-

and perceive other parts of

Only depressed people

itself,

it

through rose-colored

are realistic about

whereas the schizophrenic are uniquely accurate

life's possibilities,

in perceiving life's

connections and disjunctions. Patriots do not look too closely real conditions

and motives of

their fellow citizens,

to

what they wish.

In Morality and Imagination^ Yi-Fu

why humans seldom He

any more than

Happy people choose

lovers look too closely at each other's skin. see only

at the

Tuan

offers a variety of reasons

put their great endowment of imagination to use.

considers most important the need to be efficient: "Efficiency re-

quires that most of the time

attend to only one aspect of

we it

—

ignore the rich texture of reality to its

use." Implicit in the tools

human

beings use are one-dimensional approaches to the world. Routine,

which makes the world schematic, helps exclude much from consideration. Finally, fatigue

encourages humans to reduce the world to "the

landmarks and directions necessary Third, the house of the resistance to

to finding

human mind,

our

way home."'"

capable of both incredible

and compartmentalization of new

ideas, also

welcomes

all

kinds of images. However, few are welcomed beyond the threshold of sentience into the ballroom of

need to throw out the old in a

while

it

does precisely

to

full

consciousness.

make room

that.

for the new, although

stir

and

Then they conflict

once

There are periods, especially when

and iwell-being are threatened, when the small and ignored.

The mind does not

force themselves

invisible

life

cannot be

on the imagination, often amid

a

of thoughts, images, and feelings. Usually, however,

CONCLUSION

I

171

the

mind houses new and

views side by

side,

old, large

and small,

without the pairs ever so

and are not

uncommon

much

scientific

as meeting,

them do pop up

bizarre and idiosyncratic syntheses of

and

traditional

though

in individuals

in the culture at large.

Fourth, moral and religious considerations both close and open the

mind

and

to the unseen. Small

invisible things can

go unacknowledged

because they contradict standing moral perceptions. Groups deny the microscopic findings of the day because they are evidence of the world

being otherwise than their belief system represents traditional

Hindu

it.

Contrariwise,

culture predisposes people to divide almost the entire

world of things, however small, into the pure and the impure and to imagine invisible souls in

and death

as part

all

living things, ordaining their birth, travail,

of a great universal and eternal process of reincar-

nation.

and command elements of

Fifth, certain invisible entities survive

human

imagination.

Even

ever before, the dead

retain

still

prayed to and more attenuated than

if less

powers over the

living.

Their entan-

glement with human imagination survived the Reformation and Enlightenment.

Though

superstition,

and religion

dramatically diminished, other elements of magic, still

haunt

human

imagination.

Within people's minds there remains a strong inclination to believe in a

God

—

or

some

small and mighty.

A

force

—who

Methodist

has his eyes on the sparrow / order, justice, love, and

God

hymn

He

mercy

guides

—

all

things, seen

and unseen,

revealingly runs, "Because he

cares for

me."

Human yearnings

happiness and pleasure too

to deflect the smallest particles or

—

172

/

CONCLUSION

entreat

subdue the most rebellious

Science and technology have yet to postulate something that

for

cells.

human

beings will not pray to change

amply

diation and electricity

—

or to exploit, as the histories of ra-

quack cures involving

testify, in

invisible

forces.

Human

beings simply do not willingly sacrifice their lives to

or their fates to the blind course of atoms.

molecules,

and genes

cells,

to getting well, or simply

fit

human tales and

God

to ask the majestic cell

in

or molecule.

The

human thought

is

emotions.

required.

of the heavens to

drive to anthropomorphize

human person

as the

When it comes

is

important,

They do not

alter the is

atoms,

insist that

way on something

having one's

people adjust their prayers to what

They

fate,

hesitate

course of a single

as

deeply ingrained

rooted in the physical body,

averse to death and pain, and averse to a meaning and will imposed

on him other than

his

The microcosmic

God once

did.

own.

orders do not serve

Though awesome

human needs

as the

in intricacy, energy,

dead and

and speed, the

new microcosm forms no pantheon and promises no mercy, no no community, no ruling theology,

and

particular.''

friendship.

has no set

A

Yes.

a certain cosmology.

worldview of

The

sorts.^

to

them short of symmetry. One does not

measure the smallest

knowledge

is

bits

and chart

not whole. Rather,

by complex mathematics,

priests,

no

creature. Powerful

A

No.

religion.'*

continual addition of novel and fresh elements

stir

does not even appear to have a bottom.

their

Maybe.

no sure

small and invisible do not yet even constitute

enduring order when one peers into the It

rituals,

no freeing message, and no caring

The new worlds of the

leave

It

mission,

see a crystalline

of infinitesimal

Its

masters

still

bits

below.

lack devices

their vaporizing speeds. it is

and

Even

tentative, rigged together

stray intuitions, bold hypotheses, occasionally

CONCL US ION

I

173

homey metaphors, and

the need for

Indeed, the whole

of physics

field

odd and tenacious observation.

fell

decades ago under the shadow

of indeterminacy. According to Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, if

things are measured as waves, their frequencies are miscalculated;

and

computed by

if

And

lated.

if that

their frequency, their

were not enough,

wavelengths are miscalcu-

light itself distorts the object ob-

served, which paradoxically results in the idea that

we wish

to see

once we cast light on

Converts are not

won

and complexity.

tainty

do not

fit

cannot see what

it."

to a religion or

Human minds

their bodily-sized

we

even

a

worldview by uncer-

are not captivated

by

things that

metaphors, their self-dramatizing

stories,

earthbound moral imaginations, or their heartfelt emotional needs.

their

Mortal

human

beings

—

more than contemplate

creatures of skin, bone, and dust the infinitude of grains of sand

calculate the quivering path of a rising fleck of dust.

—want

on

And

to

do

a

beach or

so

new and

novel images, concepts, and practices associated with the contemporary

microcosm are

still

are not fully assimilated into language.

invoked

and define what

to mediate, negotiate,

beyond human eye and hand. Anthropomorphists beings pound

all

sations, interests,

Older metaphors

things into a shape to

fit

lies

below and

to the bone,

their stories.

human

Their conver-

and imaginations remain tethered to local wells.

Armies of experts and

specialists in the

new microworlds

relieve

people of the burden of taking these worlds too seriously, of having to struggle to conceive rely

what they cannot perceive. As they increasingly

on doctors and medical

what

is

tests to tell

going on inside them, so they

unseen worlds that encircle their

174

/

them how they

CONCLUSION

lives.

are feeling and

trust experts to

monitor the

Unless knowledge of the minute

is

needed for health or offers a chance

reach exceed

be

to

Another reason

why human

bodies. Bodies place

humans

in a

all

by

their bodies

—

is

in

that

human

human

beings have

which they have contact

are constantly compelled to

fingertips, lips,

size.

To

mea-

and eyes. These impose

The imagination cannot wander

things perceived.

long from the imposition of body

human

world

They

with darkness, death, and dust.

on

should

imagination will not be transformed by

the microworlds of science and technology

a scale

why

grasp?

its

sure the small

rich,

state this idea

far or

another way,

beings are fastened to the old order by bodies and senses, which

remain the

gauges of smallness and greatness.

first

And

this is

but to

paraphrase Alexander Pope's reply to the microscopists in his Essay on

Man:

Why For

has not

Man

a

microscopic

this plain reason,

Man

Say what the use, were

eye.''

not a Fly.

is

finer optics giv'n,

T'inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n.-^

Or

touch,

if

tremblingly alive

To smart and agonize

Or

at

all o'er.

every

pore.''

quick effluvia darting thro' the brain,

Die of

a rose in aromatic

pain.''

VI. 193— 200

As

if

it

were

the scale of the constricted.

No

set

on

a great spring, the

human body no sooner does the

matter

mind invariably returns

how

far

brilliant scientist

from her microscope than her mind

it

is

to

expanded or

withdraw her eye

instinctively follows eye

and hand

CONCL USION

I

175

— back

world she knows and

to the

discover creatures in Gargantua's

lives in.

No

sooner does Rabelais

mouth than he observes them grow-

ing cabbages and playing tennis. Swift's Lilliputians never act as though

they are other than life-sized humans.

The mind, ever

measure of things, anthropomorphizes both what it

it

true to

its first

magnifies and what

miniaturizes.

The mind conduct of

will not forsake the

life,"

which vision

may

Humans

its

"The whole

senses.

Descartes wrote, "depends on our senses,

the noblest and

not always

mind.

and

is

body and

among

most universal."'^ While out of sight

mean out of mind,

it

does mean not easily kept in

easily forget the universal whirl of particles. Technical

however

scientific findings,

fascinating, can quickly dissolve

when

they come in contact with the powerful sensations and images of every-

day

Hfe.

So, in the contemporary

two kingdoms of the and the small

two worlds

there are and always will be

small: the small as defined

as created

exist

human mind

by

by

human body

the

science and technology. For

most

part, these

independently of one another. With the exception of

the psychologically aberrant (such as the compulsive cleaner), people switch

between these two worlds

handwasher and

as mindlessly as they

switch their lights off and on, or open and close their water spigots.'^ It is

not surprising that

from going about

this

dichotomous view does not

their business. In

normal times they

inhibit people

live

comfortably

with ambiguity and logical inconsistency. Compartmentalization of thoughts and feelings follow their collision.

176

/

own

The

CONCLUSION

left

is

tracks

an ordinary and necessary

—and

activity.

Thoughts

they often intersect and cross without

hand truly does not know what the

right

hand does

or

if it

does,

it

does not care.

face of life-sized problems.

The mind can

How much

achieve indifference in the

easier are repression

ference in the case of the small and invisible

when

ceived to intrude on bodily experiences, personal

and

indif-

they are not per-

fate,

or everlasting

destiny.

Despite the growing lexicon of minute and invisible things, beings

still

insist that all things

be made to

fit

their

own

human

personal and

moral narratives. Even when human beings have written the obituaries of minuscule things past and embraced infinitesimal and virtual things new, they will dread the

still

fear dust's final

infinite granularity

of

all

requiem for

all life.

things, their

own

They

will

selves and

still

mean-

ings included.

CONCL USION

I

177

NOTES

I

NTR O D UCTI O N 1.

J.

chanics

Gordon Ogden, The Kingdom of Dust (Chicago: Popular MeCompany,

1912), 10.

2.

Ibid., 10—13.

3.

WiUiam Bryant Logan,

Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin

York: Riverhead Books, 1995),

of the Earth (New

9.

4.

Ogden, Kingdom of Dust

5.

Cited in Logan, Dirt,

6.

C. T. Onions, The Oxford Dictionary ofEnglish Etymology (Oxford:

^

16.

7.

Clarendon Press, 1966), 295. 7.

Irving Adler estimates that "after traveling only 2,000 light-years,

half of the light [from the center of the galaxy]

is

scattered.

.

.

.

After 4,000

years, only one-fourth of the light remains to continue the journey.

.

.

.

After 6,000 years, only one-eighth of the Hght remains. ...

By

the time

reaches us, after 25,000 years, the light from the center of the galaxy feeble that

cannot be seen" {Dust

it

it

so

is

[New York: The John Day Company,

1958], 116). 8.

They

reach the upper atmosphere, where "it has been calculated that

a reduction of solar radiation

of a cubic kilometer

by twenty percent would require only

of a cubic mile) of a very fine-grained dust."

('/eoo

Robert Muir Wood, Earthquakes and Volcanoes

and Nicolson, 1987), 9.

'/^oo

(New

York: Weidenfeld

114.

113— 14.

Ibid.,

10. Adler, Dust^ 16. 11.

For

a study, see

Hall, 1981). 12.

For

Douglas Hurt, The Dust Bowl (Chicago: Nelson-

used Elizabeth Bank's thoughtful summary of the work.

I

a recent discussion of the origin of the dust storms of the 1930s,

see William

Cronon,

"A

Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narra-

tive," /or/rna/ oyy^men'can History 13.

The word

Latin industria,

industry,

(March 1992), 1347—76.

which comes from the French

and

Industrie

which connotes hard work and diligence, goes back

to old

Latin indostruus, formed from the prefix indu and struere, to build (John

Ayto, ed.. Dictionary of Word Origins

[New York: Arcade

Publishing,

1990], 298). 14.

Over

contain as

a dusty city, Adler estimated in 1958, a cubic inch of air

many

as fifty million dust particles.

With an average

dust particles of one micron (one-millionth of a meter) over

heavier particles descend on in

the city as a steady rain,

hundreds and even thousands of tons. "In the

tons of dust that falls

on

fall

on every square mile

a square mile each year

is

city

in a year. In

may of

size

cities,

the

measured annually

of Los Angeles, 332

Chicago, the amount

782 tons." In England, which

is

as

dusty as the United States, "the amount of dust falling on a square mile in a year ranges

180

/

from about 200

NOTES TO PAGES y

to 2,000 tons a year" (Adler, Dust,

92—

93)-

A

1970 Encyclopaedia Britannica

million tons of dust settle

on the United

come from

31 million tons

pollen.

The remainder

is

article

on dust suggests

Of this

States per year.

natural resources, including

generated by

human

that about 43

i

amount,

million tons of

with industry

activities,

that time being the principal contributor. Detroit, with 72 tons per

more than doubled Los Angeles's

figure of 33 tons per

at

month,

month. Helmut

Landsberg, "Dust," Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 7 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1970), 788. For data on in the

United States in 1997, see Abstract of the United

ington, D.C.: U.S. Department of 15.

Commerce,

and

their sources

States, ic)gy

(Wash-

1997), 234—35.

Dennis Eberl, "Clay," McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and

Technology 16.

air pollutants

(New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1992), 686.

Parodying Descartes's

first

proof, "I think, therefore

I

am,"

Guy

Thuillier (personal communication, 1994) suggests the feminine cogito be-

came 17.

"je frotte,

done

suis" (I rub

and scrub, therefore

I

am).

Joseph Amato, review of Suellen Hoy's Chasing Dirt: The American

Pursuit of Cleanliness

CHAPTER 1.

je

(\C)()^),

Journal of Social History (Fall 1996), 277—82.

1

Daan Smit and Nicky den Harogh,

Seeds and Fruits

(New

York:

Smithmark, 1996), 3—4. 2.

For an overview of the hidden power of plants, see Emilio Marozzi,

Francesco Mari, and Elisabetta Bertol, Le piante magiche: Viaggio nel fantastico

mondo

delle droghe vegetali (Firenze:

Case Editrice Le Lettere,

1996). 3.

Hippocrates proposed "excrementitious material" for numerous dis-

eases. Galen,

it

might comfort the reader to know, not only advised against

the pharmaceutical use of human feces but also disagreed with Xenocrates,

who had recommended

the internal and external use of sweat, urine,

NOTES TO PAGES

8~i8

/

li

menstrual

fluid,

made

waste:

and ear wax. Pliny praised the multiple uses of camel

into ashes and

taken with drinks

it

[New York: Viking

combined with

curls

oil, it

and

Press, 1969], 115-27, 35-38, 139).

ground-up newborn

hot, sultry (dusts)

and

summer

made from

Man

cures dysentery (Theodor Rosebury, Life on

As

late as the sev-

enteenth century, prescriptions for scrofula included goiter tion of

frizzles hair;

rats

and small

oil, a

exposed to the sun on

lizards,

powders

days. Other healing prescriptions included toads,

which were used

concoc-

to treat cancer of the breast,

of boiled frogs and earthworms, which were used "to soothe the

oils

pain of joints, nerves, and for wounds, punctures, and malign ulcers" (Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern

Europe [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 113). 4.

ford: 5.

lona Opie and Moira Tatem,

A Dictionary of Superstitions (Ox-

eds.,

Oxford University Press, 1989), 119—20.

One

superstition accounted

it

unlucky for wedding guests to wipe

off their feet anything they stepped in

on the way

dung

a second superstition advised keeping horse

ward off pie

and

the evil eye. Others counted

to tread "in

dog

it

to the

to bring

good fortune

faeces without realizing

it

wedding, while

good luck and

to stand

on

a

cow

until afterwards" (ibid.,

141-42). 6.

The term mummy comes from

main source 7.

For

mountain

in Persia that

was the

for this profitable trade.

William

J.

Powell, Pillsbury's Best:

(Minneapolis: Pillsbury 8.

the

a useful

Company,

A

Company History from

i86c)

1985), 32.

work on how much

the world of everyday

meaning

depends on metaphorical assemblage and opposition, see George Lakoff

and Mark Johnson, Metaphors

We

Live

By

(Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1980). 9.

D. C. Winslow, "Dust," Encyclopedia Americana^

York: Americana Corp., 1964), 427—28.

i8z

/

NOTES TO PAGES

li

vol.

19

(New

—

— Hamlet

10.

This paragraph was inspired by Ernest Becker, Denial of Death

11.

(New

IV.iii.9.

York: Free Press, 1973).

Douglas argues further

12.

defied the order of things: that

it

that disorder

was

typified

was

a chaotic

by birds

jumble that

that couldn't

fly, fish

walked on the ground, and animals whose cloven hooves resembled

hands. Disorder existed

when improper mingling occurred between human

and animals, men and women, body and food, hand and mouth

(^Purity

and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966]). 13.

Ibid., 35.

14.

The

means not evil.

word immondo

Italian

just dirty

and

filthy

Immondiiia translates as

—

but immoral, corrupt, unprincipled, and

filth,

rubbish, and sweepings {Diiionario Gar-

The French

lanti della lingua italiana [Milano: Garzante, 1965]).

immonde describes what the taboo pig of the

monde

—

15.

groups

Humans

New

repulsive and disgusting.

Old Testament and the Testament

It

was used

devil himself

we

to describe I'esprit

im-

consider fictional

excremental Laputan scientists or abnormal individuals

Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Putrid

The

adjective

{Petit Larousse [Paris: Larousse, 1961]).

naturally avoid putrescence, unless

like Swift's

like the corrupt.

in the

is

nonworldly

literally translated as

Italian

is

a

synonym

for

language links the verbs putire, putrefare, pu^are (to

stink, to rot, to smell)

and the noun putana (whore). Similarly, the Al-

gonquins, a North American Indian nation, identified the prostitute with the skunk. 16.

John Ayto,

ed., "Dirt," Dictionary

Arcade Publishing, 1990), maneuver but also associated

affiliated

173.

of Word Origins (New York:

The word manure

is

not only related to

with manor and manual, indicating

were excrement, agriculture, and labor

how closely

in preindustrial times

(ibid., 337).

NOTES TO PAGES

21-23

/

183

C. T. Onions, ed., "Dirt," The Oxford Dictionary of English Ety-

ly.

mology (Oxford: University Press, 1966), 271.

MN:

Joseph Amato, Countryside, Mirror of Ourselves (Marshall,

18.

Crossings Press, 1981), 21—22. Peasants have been czWeA pariahs (Indian)

and peons (Spanish). Synonyms for peasant,

in various

European

lan-

guages, are words literally meaning smelly, stupid, shoeless, and dirty-

A

toed.

was

villain

a

farmhand on

a villa, a country estate. Also, the

peasant (who by definition in French

was

from the pays, the countryside)

is

the antithesis of the civiliied, the urbane, the cosmopolitan,

have their roots

in

Greek and Latin words

Nor was

for city.

all

of which

the peasant

from the court or the nobility, where people were courteous and noble. Twentieth-century American slang names for country people include clodhopper, sod buster, hayseed, hay shaker, pea picker, pumpkin peeler, stubble jumper, clover kicker,

and

shit kicker.

coon skinner, sorghum

lapper, turnip sucker,

See The American Thesaurus of Slang

(New

York:

Thomas

Y. Crowell, 1945).

For the primary source of my

19.

Amato, "A

Were

portrait of the old order, see Joseph

A

World without Intimacy:

Time before

Portrait of a

We

Intimate Lovers," International Journal of Social Sciences 61, no. 4

(Autumn 20.

1986): 155-^8.

This particular essay appears in Febvre's Life

in

Renaissance France

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 4-5. Febvre and Marc Bloch founded the French Annales school of historiography, which since the 1920s has

grown

to

be the most

influential school

of history in the

world. 21.

Ibid., 8-9.

Febvre wrote of the central place of the kitchen

home: "The ordinary dwelling

was

a manor; people spent

most

for the

gentleman

who was

of their time in a single

in the

not a prince

room, the kitchen.

Generally, meals were eaten there. (French houses almost never had a special

[84

/

room

for dining until the eighteenth century.

NOTES TO PAGES

23-2$

Even Louis XIV,

.

on ordinary occasions,

dow

in his

ate his

meals

at a

square table in front of the win-

bedroom. The nobles of the sixteenth century, having fewer

pretensions, generally ate in the kitchen.) This lect

of some provinces, the

'heater.'

That

room

is

called, in the dia-

was warm

in

There was always

a

the giveaway.

is

the kitchen, or at least less cold than elsewhere.

It

fire."

Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order

22.

in

Rural Europe (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1978), 181. 23.

Cdim'^oresA^

Bread of Dreams^ 151—52.

24.

For works

that cast light

on

the

human

place in the biological

kingdom, see Frederick Cartwright, Disease and History (New York: Barnes

&

Noble, 1972); George Forster and Orest Ranum,

eds..

Biology

of Man and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1976); E. Wrigley, Population 25.

and History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969).

Joseph Lopreato,

"How Would You Like to

Be

a Peasant.'^"

Human

Organiiation (Winter 1965): 306. 26.

(New

Emmanuel LeRoy

Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land ofError

York: Vintage, 1979), 222,

10.

27.

Ibid., 288.

28.

Georges Duby, The Early Growth ofthe European Economy: Warriors

and Peasants from

the Seventh to the

Twelfth Century, trans.

Howard

B.

Clarke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 29. 29.

Peter Laslett, The World

Age (New York: Charles

We Have Lost: England before the Industrial

Scribner's Sons, 1965), 103.

30.

Camporesi, Bread of Dreams,

3

Eugen Weber,

1

cieties from the

A Modern

Renaissance

to the

33.

History of Europe: Present

(New

Men,

York:

Cultures,

WW

and So-

Norton, 1971),

204-5. 32.

Ackerman,

A Natural History of the

Senses, 6\.

NOTES TO PAGES 26-^0

/

185

.

33-

Norbert

Elias, History

of Manners (New York: Pantheon Books:

1978), 48. 34.

(New

Cited in Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life^ 1400—1800

&

York: Harper

Row,

1967), 122.

George Fatherstonaugh,

35.

A

Canoe Voyage up

the

Minaysotor

(St.

Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1970), vol. 2, 69-70. 36.

Arthur Young, cited

Century Italy 37.

(New

in

Maurice Vaussard, Daily Life

in Eighteenth-

York: Macmillan, 1963), 51-52.

Denis Mack Smith, Manini

(New Haven:

Yale University Press,

1994), 21. 38.

Weber,

A Modern

39.

Gamni

Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London:

and Sons, 1977),

History, 204. J.

M. Dent

18.

Bread of Dreams,

40.

Czvcv^oxesi,

41.

Ibid.

42.

Ibid.

43.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a

Sixteenth- Century Miller (Baltimore:

152.

Johns Hopkins University Press,

1980), 57. 44.

Camporesi, Bread of Dreams,

CHAPTER 1

sures

156—57, 159.

2

Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions

ing, Culture, 2.

55,

and

the

Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996),

For measurements

in preindustrial

Nicholson,

Europe, see Witold Kula, Mea-

Men and Measures: A

History of Weights and Measures, Ancient

& Co., 1912). For the history of weigh-

ing instruments themselves, see Charles Testus,

/

Eat-

and Men (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Edward

and Modern (London: Smith, Elder

186

into

62.

NOTES TO PAGES

jo-j;

Memento du pesage: Les

instruments de pesage, leur histoire a travers les ages (Paris:

Hermann

& Cie,

1946). 3.

and Measures, 4.

How Much and How Many:

Jeanne Bendick, rev. ed.

(New

The Story of Weights

York: Franklin Watts, 1989),

14, 46.

In Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200— i68j

Cambridge University

bridge:

what he

Press, 1994),

Edward Grant

(Cam-

illustrates

how

medieval cosmos, "a fusion of pagan, Greek ideas, and

calls the

biblical descriptions, especially the creation

account in Genesis," preoc-

cupied high medieval thought. Formulated in the twelfth and thirteenth

dominated Western thought about the

centuries, these scholastic ideas

heavens and earth

until

approximately 1700.

tions appeared in the Renaissance

By

the time rival interpreta-

and early modern period

—

for

example

Platonism, atomism, stoicism, neoplatonism, hermeticism, and especially

Copernicanism thought ruled.

—

It

the

essentially

would continue

the heavens and the earth

natural science

—

—

Aristotelian

cosmology of

scholastic

to constitute a tradition of thinking about

setting the

until its final defeat at the

naturalis principia mathematica (1687),

first

premises of what

we

call

hands of Newton's Philosophiae

which marked the triumph of a view

of the cosmos based on empirical observation and mathematics and which linked earth and heaven to the same laws. 5.

A

useful discussion of the premises of the natural sciences found in

medieval thought

is

provided by Edward Grant, The Foundations ofModern

Science in the Middle

1996); for the

Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

freedom and tolerance of discussion and other elements

that

constituted "the substantive pre-conditions" of the scientific revolution, see esp. 191—205. 6.

Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, 422—33.

7.

Ibid., 579, 580, 581.

8.

Cited in A. C. Crombie, The History of Science from Augustine

Galileo

(New

to

York: Dover Publications, 1979), 45.

NOTES TO PAGES 39-41

/

9-

Ibid., 47.

10.

Crombie

between

offers a table of the principal sources of

a.d. 500

Western science

and 1300. The range of sources on metaphysics, physics,

astronomy, mathematics, medicine, plants, minerals, geology, and optics is

surprising. Aside

from Western works by Aristode, Plato,

Pliny, Galen,

Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, and, notably, Lucretius (complete text avail-

Arab works by Alfardbi, Haly Abbas, Alhazen, Avi-

able only in 1417),

cenna, and Averroes are represented {The History of Science, 55-63). 11.

Crombie, The History of

Theories

of Vision from Al-Kindi

Science,

to

no. Also see David Lindberg,

Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, if^Tj). 12.

For examples of imaginative medieval conceptions of the

afterlife

see Jeffrey Russell, Storia del Paradiso (Roma: Editori Laterza, 1996);

Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984);

Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of The

Chicago Press, 1985); and Arthur O. Lovejoy, Being:

A Study of the History of an Idea (New York:

Great

Chain of

Harper and Brothers,

1936). 13.

A. C. Crombie contends that what truly limited medieval science

was the absence of an imperative

to

make

actual

measurements and

to

manipulate mathematical formulas to describe phenomena. Crombie, "Quantification in Medieval Physics," in Changes in Medieval Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 188-207. 14.

Arno

In his nineteenth-century classic. History ofMaterialism Press, 1974), Frederick Albert

Lange

(New York:

identified Pierre Gassendi, a

philosopher and scientist (1592-165 5), with the revival of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius; direct opposition to Aristotle; and the connection

of

classical physics 15.

and modern atomism

Edward Grant argues

source of

modern

/

i,

253-55).

for the importance of medieval thought as a

science in the conclusion of The Foundations ofModern

Science, esp. 191— 215.

188

(vol.

NOTES TO PAGES 42-44

i6.

Robert Lenoble, Histoire de

I'idee

de la nature (Paris: Albin Michel,

1969), 259-307. 17.

Ibid., 302.

18.

Hugh

Kearney,

McGraw-Hill, 1971), 19.

Science

and Change,

(New

i5oo—iyoo

York:

181.

Richard Kiekhefer, Magic

Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cam-

in the

bridge University Press, 1989), esp. 133—39. 20.

The phrase "subterranean physics" comes from Johann Joachim

Becher, Physicae Subterranease (Leipzig:

J.

L. Gleditsch, 1703), cited in

Pamela Smith's The Business of Alchemy: Science and

Roman Empire

Becher (1635—82), an important alchemist and

new

of his times, and his role in mingling older cosmic views with

new

book

man

offers a study of

science, 21.

economic development, and commerce

at the

Habsburg

court.

Smith, The Business of Alchemy, 271.

CHAPTER 1.

Holy

Culture in the

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 19. Smith's

3

These examples from early

fifth- to

eleventh-century medieval Eu-

rope were taken from James Snyder, Medieval Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Fourth to Fourteenth Century

tice-Hall, 1989);

(Englewood

Cliffs, N.J.:

Pren-

John EQckwixh, Early Medieval Art: Carolingian, Ottoman,

Romanesque (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969); and Andrew Martindale, Gothic Art 2.

ture 52.

the

Medieval Concept of Order

Also of use

Row, 3.

137.

Otto von Simpson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architec-

and

in cathedrals is

&

(London: Thames and Hudson, 1967),

(New

in illuminating the level

York: Harper

& Row,

1964),

of fineness and delicacy expressed

Jean Gimpel, The Cathedral Builders

(New

York: Harper

1983).

This image

is

found

in the early Christian Apocalypse

reproduced in Alice Turner, The History of Hell

(New

of St. Paul,

York: Harcourt

Brace, 1993), 87.

NOTES TO PAGES 44-48

/

189

Jeffrey Russell, Storia del Paradiso

4-

(Rome: Editori Laterza, 1996),

186, 185.

A. C. Crombie, "Quantification

5.

in

Medieval Physics," in Changes

in

Medieval Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 203—5. 6.

Crombie, "Quantification," 201.

7.

Cited in Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revo-

lution in the

T. K.

8.

From

Middle Ages (New York: Penguin Books, 1976),

Derry and Trevor

the Earliest

Times

Williams,

I.

A.D. igoo

to

A

149.

Short History of Technology:

(New York: Dover Publications,

1993),

104-13. 9.

Benedetto Dei, Cronica, cited in Anabel Thomas, The Painter's Prac-

in

tice

Renaissance

Tuscany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1995), 16. 10.

Erran Wood, "The Tradition from Medieval to Renaissance," in

Dan

The History of Glass, ed.

Klein and

Ward Lloyd (London:

Orbis,

1984), 67. 11.

sity

Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: Univer-

of Virginia Press, 1985), 142.

12.

J.

C. Margolin,

voyants au

XVIe

"Des

lunettes et des

hommes, ou

la satire

des mal-

siecle," Annales: Economies, Societe, Civilisations 30, nos.

2—3 (March—June 1975), 387. Also see Edward Rosen, "The Invention of Eyeglasses," Journal of the History ofMedicine

11

(January and April 1956),

13—46, 183—218. 13.

For

drawing and modeling and

a history of

fifteenth-century

Drawings and

Italy,

see

the Practice

Robert

Scheller,

their definition in

Exemplum: Model-Book

of Artistic Transmission

in the

900—ca. 1470) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University

Middle Ages

Press,

1995),

(ca.

esp.

1-17. 14.

of the

[90

/

D.

S. L.

Cardwell, Technology, Science and History:

Major Developments

NOTES TO PAGES

in the

A

Short Study

History of Western Mechanical Technology

48-s}

I

and Their Relationship with Science and Other Forms ofKnowledge (London:

Heinemann Educational, 15.

Of interest

is

1972), 27.

Samuel Edgerton, "The Renaissance Development of

Scientific Illustration," in Science

Shirley and F. 97,

and

John

the Arts in the Renaissance, ed.

David Hoeniger (Washington: Folger Books,

and James Ackerman, "Involvement of Artists

in

168—

1985),

Renaissance Sci-

ence," in Shirley and Hoeniger, Science and the Arts, 94—129. 16. 17.

(New 18.

Thomas, The

Painter's Practice, 32—34.

A. C. Crombie, The History of Science from Augustine

to Galileo

York: Dover Publications, 1979), 112.

High Renaissance

art

can be conceived of as a refinement of

fif-

teenth-century techniques, especially the mastery of mixing light and

shadow

in portrait painting

dlelight. In

by placing

subjects

around

fires

High Renaissance (New York: Penguin Books,

or near can-

1975), Michael

Levey writes of Correggio's Adoration of the Shepherds: "Here

painting

oil

not only creates the penumbra of atmospheric darkness, through which

we

gradually descry further shapes and even the cool, faint glow of dawn

in the distance, but the incandescent brightness

conveyed by the graceful drama of 19.

light

from the Child

and shade"

is

intensely

(33).

See Madeleine Pinault, The Painter as Naturalist (Paris: Flamma-

rion, 1991).

20.

For a study, see James Ackerman, "Leonardo's Eye," Journal of

IVarhurg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 108—48. 21.

Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern

Science in the Middle

Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),

George Sarton, Six

22.

IVings:

Men of Science

York: Meridian Books, 1966), 174. Also of interest

Meehan,

"A

in the is

195.

Renaissance

L. S.

(New

King and M. C.

History of Autopsy," American Journal ofPathology 73 (1973):

514-4423.

Crombie argues

that "taken as a whole, medieval medicine

is

a

NOTES TO PAGES 53-56

/

191

remarkable product of that empirical intelligence seen in Western tech-

nology generally 24.

in the

Middle Ages" {The History of Science^ 237).

In one instance, even Leonardo, behaving like teachers of medicine

of the time, followed the inherited text rather than his

He showed

own

observations.

holes in the right ventricle of the heart that did not exist but

that satisfied Galen's notions of

how

the blood circulated (Sarton, Six

Wings, 226). For a general characterization of medieval and renaissance

Nancy

medicine, see Introduction to

Press, 1990);

Siraisi,

Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An

Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Science: The

David Lindberg, The Beginning of Western

Eu-

ropean Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context,

600 B.C.

to

A.D. i45o (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),

and George Sarton, Ancient and Medieval Science during

esp. 317—68;

Renaissance, 1480-1600

(New

York: A.

S.

Barnes and Company,

the

1955),

esp. 7—51. 25.

Dover

Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks ofLeonardo da Vinci (New York: Publications, 1970), vol. 2, 115, 119, 122.

26.

Sarton, Ancient and Medieval Science,

27.

Marie Boas, The

Scientific Renaissance,

per and Row, 1962), 179; Allen Debus,

of the Renaissance," Clio Medica

"How

Chemicals Entered the

11,

51.

1450—1630

(New York: Har-

"The Pharmaceutical Revolution

no. 4 (1976): 308-11; G. Urdang,

Official

Pharmacopoeias," Archives

Inter-

nationales d'Histoire des Sciences 7 (1954): 303—4. 28.

For

a

book based on

through dissection produced

a

the thesis that the discovery of the

new

body

consciousness and sensibility, see Jon-

athan Sawday, The Body Emblaioned: Dissection and the

Human Body

in

Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). 29.

William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings

(London: 30.

192

/

J.

M. Dent

S. Lilley,

&

Sons, 1990), 46.

"The Development of

NOTES TO PAGES

$