ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the politicization of self-purification and the development of analytical and purificatory nihilism both as a philosophical principle and a political stratagem. The tumultuous scientific polemic that had characterized discussions of water quality throughout the 1850s was absent during the early 1860s. The recycling advocates also objected to the doctrine of self-purification in general, because it was continually being invoked by local authorities as a reason why the expensive and untested recycling schemes of the enthusiasts and the government were unnecessary. Hitherto nihilism had been pragmatic, an expression of concern by water chemists who recognized the gap between the methodology of water analysis and knowledge of the identity and behavior of morbid poisons in water, and thus distrusted purification because they could not determine whether it was effective. Complementing Benjamin Brodie’s chemical deductions was his devastating and intransigent skepticism.
