ABSTRACT
The role science took was indeed directed by the inducements held out but these inducements were toward participation in political and legal disputes rather than toward solving scientific problems. River pollution and the associated water-and-sewage problems were the province of engineers, chemists, and medical men. The scope of sanitary engineering, itself a product of the public health movement of the 1840s, was particularly broad. The public image of science suffered greatly as a result of scientists’ participation in adversary water proceedings. Chemistry could solve water problems, it was felt, but chemists were dealing unconscionably with the public. A great deal of the testimony of expert witnesses was devoted to the establishment or destruction of credibility, to the presentation of vast quantities of evidence which might be irrelevant but were certainly impressive, or to discussion of reasons why such and such must be so or could not possibly be so.
