ambix, Vol. 61 No. 3, August, 2014, 279–298

A Conflict of Analysis: Analytical Chemistry and Milk Adulteration in Victorian Britain Jacob Steere-Williams College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA

This article centres on a particularly intense debate within British analytical chemistry in the late nineteenth century, between local public analysts and the government chemists of the Inland Revenue Service. The two groups differed in both practical methodologies and in the interpretation of analytical findings. The most striking debates in this period were related to milk analysis, highlighted especially in Victorian courtrooms. It was in protracted court cases, such as the well known Manchester Milk Case in 1883, that analytical chemistry was performed between local public analysts and the government chemists, who were often both used as expert witnesses. Victorian courtrooms were thus important sites in the context of the uneven professionalisation of chemistry. I use this tension to highlight what Christopher Hamlin has called the defining feature of Victorian public health, namely conflicts of professional jurisdiction, which adds nuance to histories of the struggle of professionalisation and public credibility in analytical chemistry.

Introduction On Wednesday 27 June 1883, a routine case was settled in the Manchester Police Court. Richard Wardle, a Derbyshire dairy farmer, was charged with selling milk which, according to Manchester’s Public Analyst, Charles Estcourt, contained four per cent added water. Wardle appealed the conviction, an action permitted under the 1875 Sale of Food and Drugs Act (SFDA), and a sample of the accused milk was sent to the Government Chemical Laboratory of the Inland Revenue Department, located in London at Somerset House.1 1

Anon. “Milk Adulteration: Conflict as to the Standard of Analysis,” The Manchester City News, and “Somerset House and Purity of Milk,” newspaper clipping from The National Archives, Kew, Inland Revenue Service, DSIR 26/247. For a general history of the laboratory, see P. W. Hammond and H. Egan, Weighed in the Balance (London: HMSO, 1992).

© Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2014

DOI 10.1179/0002698014Z.00000000058

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Upon separate analysis, the government chemists declared the sample unadulterated. Allowing for decomposition—the sample was three weeks old by the time the government chemists undertook their analysis—they issued a certificate which stated that Wardle’s milk fell within the normal range of what their laboratory considered “genuine.” On 6 October 1883, the Manchester Court reconvened to hear the appeal, and to sort out the conflicting scientific evidence. On trial was a dairy farmer, but on display was the use, the valuation and, in this case and many others, the inherent conflict in analytical science in the late Victorian period. The court questioned Wardle, the dairyman; Estcourt, Manchester’s Public Analyst; and James Bell, Principal of the government laboratory, who was called to the hearing from London with two chemical assistants in tow.2 At the centre of the conflict was the question of why the two certificates had differed. Was it that analytical methods in determining milk adulteration diverged between the two chemists, the magistrates probed, or that the two held different standards of interpreting adulteration? The 1875 SFDA, for example, had left the standard of adulteration undefined, chemically and legally speaking.3 The Manchester court was faced with a difficult but all too common problem; one that obfuscated the demarcation between scientific expertise, law, and public health in the late Victorian period. How was the court to determine whether a dairy farmer had perniciously sold adulterated milk? More problematically, how was the law to adduce guilt given an inherent conflict in the scientific basis for determining adulteration? Whose scientific evidence, and whose scientific expertise, in other words, was to be trusted? The typical outcome of such cases, as in the case against Wardle, was that frustrated local magistrates confirmed the appeal and dismissed the original conviction. The dairy farmer, to use a common Victorian euphemism, was sent back to the farm to “pat the cow with the iron tail.”4 The Manchester Milk Case, as it was contemporaneously known, stands as a prototypical ‘conflict of analysis’ within Victorian chemistry.5 It was representative of hundreds of cases of failed prosecutions of milk adulteration in Britain from 1870 to 1900. The pattern was all too familiar to those aggravated scientists and public officials involved: a local public analyst would certify that a farmer had adulterated milk; the local court would convict; the farmer would appeal; the sample would be sent to the government laboratory, and would then be sent back with a certificate of authenticity. It was so common that The Grocer, the leading British journal devoted to the interests of food manufacturers and especially, ‘the breakfast table,’ went as far as to “advise the trade … to refer samples, in prosecutions under the Sale of Food Act, to the chemists at Somerset House for independent 2 3 4

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Anon., “Milk Adulteration: Conflict as to the Standard of Analysis.” It was not until 1901 that Parliament provided a legal definition of ‘pure milk.’ By the 1860s it was a common phrase. Well known agricultural chemist Augustus Voelcker went as far as to say that “the cow with the iron tail, indeed, is said to be the best friend of the milkman, perhaps not without good reason.” Augustus Voelcker, “On Milk,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 24 (1863): 286–320, on 312. The Analyst, the official organ of the Society of Public Analysts, dubbed the case so, and devoted the entire issue of November 1883 to the proceedings.

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analysis, and very frequently such reference results in the dismissal of the summons.”6 The lacuna created by scientific conflict, it seems, was filled with trade opportunism. The Manchester Milk Case is a rich illustration of the professional fissure within British analytical chemistry in the second half of the nineteenth century. It thus provides an intriguing lens through which to explore the practical divisions in the nineteenth-century professionalisation of analytical chemistry. The case initially suggests that analytical chemistry was divided along the lines of both theory and practice. John Pickstone has called the Victorian period an “analytical age,” instantiated in western Europe and North America by the institutional reality that at the end of the nineteenth century analytical chemists were “working for government in the enforcement of industrial and public health legislation that they had helped promote.”7 This was no doubt part of the professionalisation of chemistry writ large, a process fuelled by the dictum that David Cahan has articulated, whereby “the nineteenth century” and “science” became inextricably yoked to the concept of social “progress.”8 Pickstone, in his influential Ways of Knowing, identified three major divisions in nineteenth-century analytical sciences: technoscientific practices in government, in universities, and in industrial companies.9 This article examines an internal conflict in the governmental practice of the analytical sciences, but reflects at a deeper level the co-constituted process by which a conflicted science might be used and understood in the public sphere, and communicated to the public. I use the Manchester Milk Case as an example of inherent tensions in the practice of analytical science as it emerged in the late nineteenth century. Practice and also its performance are especially useful categories in exploring conflicts in the history of science.10 Untrained in expert witnessing in Victorian courts, analytical chemists communicated their science in a way that was, as I argue below, inescapably performative. Local public analysts were arbiters of chemical science in the public sphere, but so too were the government chemists at Somerset House, although the latter had the legal weight of being official civil servants. Peter Atkins has suggested as much for the courtroom, noting that “the articulacy skills of the witness are very different from those of a laboratory scientist, so this required a hybrid expertise that was

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Anon. “Somerset House Again,” Food, Drugs, and Drink 1 (10 September 1892): 11. John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 104. David Cahan, ed., From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4. John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, 14. On the professionalisation of Victorian chemistry, see Colin A. Russell, Noel G. Coley, and Gerrylynn K. Roberts, Chemists by Profession: The Origins and Rise of the Royal Institute of Chemistry (London: Milton Keynes, 1977). “Technoscience” is a term widely applied in Science and Technology Studies to indicate the co-production and entanglement of science practice, technological development, and society. Though the term has been used variously, for one of the earliest iterations see Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Michael Worboys, “Practice and Science of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,” Isis 102 (2011): 109–15, on 115.

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performative.”11 Many practising chemists seemed to loathe the duty of expert witnessing: “it is the reverse of a pleasure for the analyst to have to leave his laboratory in order to give evidence against the peccant tradesman.”12 As insufferable as they may have been to some chemists, Victorian courtrooms were also stages upon which to plant professional flags and resolve deep-seated interpretational philosophies in science. That said, courtrooms are only one site of performativity in the history of science. The conflict described in this article—between the Society of Public Analysts (SPA) and the government chemists—was one that ran deeper than bickering in Victorian courts, though the latter are especially visible sites of confrontation, and thus illumination. What we might call two competing versions of analytical epistemology, I contend, diverged vis-à-vis laboratory practices as well as the performative ways in which the results of analytical chemistry were communicated to larger British public, scientific, and social bodies, including legal ones.13 While this article situates the most pressing debate within late Victorian analytical chemistry as one defined by conflicts of analysis and expertise, of performance and practice, we must take seriously the object of such debate, namely adulterated foodstuffs, predominately milk. Milk studies constitutes one of the most vibrant and growing scholarly fields to have recently emerged, cutting across Science and Technology Studies; the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; and Food and Cultural Studies. Peter Atkins, who might not unreasonably be called the doyen of milk studies, has spent several decades studying milk and milk-related issues from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The culmination of his scholarship, Liquid Materialities (2010), forcibly argues that we need to problematise the materiality of milk. Other more overtly cultural and popular studies of milk have also recently emerged, notably Richie Nimmo’s Milk, Modernity, and the Making of the Human (2010), Anne Mendelson’s Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (2008), and Kendra Smith-Howard’s Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History Since 1900 (2013).14 These scholars have convincingly demonstrated the need to treat milk as a culturally embedded object, representative

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Peter Atkins, Liquid Materialities: A History of Milk, Science and the Law (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 107. Legal proceedings that involve expert scientific witnesses, as numerous historians of science have articulated, are a particularly useful lens for assessing discourses of credibility and expertise in the history of science. See Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity Water Analysis in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Thomas F. Gieryn, “Objectivity for These Times,” Perspectives on Science 2 (1994): 324–49; Rosemary Sargent, “Scientific Expertise and Legal Expertise: The Way of Experience in Seventeenth-Century England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989): 19–45. Anon., “Advocatus Diaboli,” The Sanitary Record (20 November 1875), 368. Some chemists, however, may have relished the performative role. See José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez, “Classrooms, Salons, Academies, and Courts: Mateu Orfila (1787-1853) and Nineteenth-Century French Toxicology,” Ambix 61, no. 2 (2014): 162–186. On the Victorian social body, see Mary Poovey, Making A Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Other milk-related studies that are relevant to this discussion include Deborah Valenze, Milk: A Local and Global History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Andrea Wiley, Re-Imagining Milk: Cultural and Biological Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2011). On milk analysis in the early modern period, see Barbara Orland, “Enlightened Milk: Reshaping a Bodily Substance into a Chemical Object,” in Ursula Klein and Emma C. Spary, eds., Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 163–97.

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of governance and ethics, and to harken back to a sociologically inspired account, of purity and pollution. In an evocative essay comparing laboratory expertise in Paris and London in the late nineteenth century, Atkins and Alessandro Stanziani have recently argued that debates over food quality were predicated on three interrelated conflicts: struggles over expertise between traders and scientific chemical experts; disputes over methodology between state and municipal laboratories; and uneven laboratory organisation.15 Atkins and Stanziani claim that the emergence of commercial laboratories in the late Victorian period, particularly the investment undertaken by larger dairy companies, “led the debate on compositional standards … and helped define what were to be considered ‘natural’ percentages of fat in milk.”16 I argue here that debates over the compositional standards in milk were chiefly driven by a conflict of analysis—over both laboratory methods of analysis and the interpretation of such results—between the government laboratory at Somerset House and public analysts. It was the public health nature of debates over food analysis in Britain, rather than the dominating interests of industrial laboratories, that sparked debate over scientific consensus and expertise. Studies of food analysis have largely neglected to explore the public health side of such debates, and instead have favoured the agricultural, economic, legal, or industrial aspects of the problem.17 I see the decades-long debate between the government laboratory and the SPA as one not solely predicated on a duty to rationalise the naturalness of milk, as Atkins contends, or a fault of the legal machinery to curb adulteration, as Derek Oddy argues, but rather one of competing visions of analytical chemistry.18 Both the government chemists and local public analysts saw themselves as practising public science, but they fundamentally disagreed as to the nature of such service. Atkins uses the debates explored here to ask the question of how chemists constructed the purity of milk. Oddy, in contrast, asks how the debate muddled rational parliamentary control over food adulteration. Though these are useful tracks, the feud between the SPA and the government chemists was a larger problematic, and one that lies at the heart of how the government—and the British public—reposed

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Peter J. Atkins and Alessandro Stanziani, “From Laboratory Expertise to Litigation: The Municipal Laboratory of Paris and the Inland Revenue Laboratory in London, 1870–1914: A Comparative Analysis,” in Fields of Expertise: Experts, Knowledge and Powers in European Modern History, ed. Christelle Rabier (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), 317–39. Atkins’ reading of the debate examined here is particularly coloured by archival sources relating to Select Parliamentary Committees in the 1890s. See Atkins, Liquid Materialities, 93. Atkins and Stanziani, “From Laboratory Expertise to Litigation,” 318. See, for example, Derek Oddy, “Food Quality in London and the Rise of the Public Analyst, 1870–1939,” in Food and the City in Europe Since 1800, ed. Peter Atkins, Peter Lummel, and Derek Oddy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), and Roger French and Jim Phillips, Cheated Not Poisoned: Food Regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875–1938 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). The outlines of the debate under consideration here have been mentioned in R. C. Chirnside and J. H. Hamence, The ‘Practising Chemists’: A History of the Society for Analytical Chemistry 1874–1974 (London: The Society for Analytical Chemistry, 1974), especially ch. 9. See also the older account, Bernard Dyer, The Society of Public Analysts and other Analytical Chemists: Some Reminiscences of its First Fifty Years with a Review of its Activities by C. Mitchell Ainsworth (London: W. Heffer & Sons, 1932).

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trust in analytical experts, particularly at moments when scientists disagreed on methodology, training, and the interpretation of science. The conflict of interest in late Victorian chemistry, then, has much to tell historians of science about the professionalisation of science in this period.19 This reading follows from the examination of the voluminous archival files of the government laboratory from the period from 1870 to 1900, which others have either infrequently examined or unsatisfactorily engaged with.20 Since the debate under examination here was not limited to laboratories or even courtrooms, these records shed new light on the way in which the Victorian public understood the fissures in analytical chemistry. This allows us to better historicise how Bell’s government laboratory was at times lauded with the progressive label of being ‘objective,’ of pursuing ‘pure science,’ while also appearing as a secretive backwater, a scientific circumlocution office. This duality evokes Robert Bud’s and Gerrylynn Roberts’ assertion that the opposition between applied (or practical) and pure (or academic) chemistry was the defining tension in Victorian British chemistry.21 Both critiques and commendations of local public analysts, too, pervaded late Victorian popular culture, providing much narrative fodder for understanding how analytical science was performed in the public sphere. The scope of this study is confined to Britain. That is not to discount or ignore the very powerful way in which laboratory methods of organic chemistry and professional expertise were predominately European—even Atlantic—in scope. Barbara Orland’s recent study of milk as a chemical object during the European Enlightenment illustrates the continental context within which debates even in late nineteenth-century Britain were framed.22 This, coupled with Alan Rocke and William Brock’s histories of organic chemistry in France and Germany in this period, makes it clear that the British conflict of analysis I examine in this study was in no way confined to Britain.23 As is well known, most British analytical chemists in the Victorian period either underwent training in Europe or were the products of European training. Here there is an obvious lineage between James Bell, the Principal of the Government Laboratory, who was trained by Alexander Williamson, who in turn was a product of Gmelin and especially Liebig. However, by studying conflicts of analysis in the context of British debates, it becomes clear that there was no single version or disciplinary vision of analytical science in late 19

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In this way this paper serves as a further case study to the valuable discussion about the professionalisation of chemistry begun by Russell et al. in Chemists by Profession, especially on 106–7. Much of the evidence that Atkins relies on comes from the 1894 Foster Committee and 1896 Russell Committee. Robert Bud and Gerrylynn Roberts, Science Versus Practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). See also Gerrylynn Roberts, “A Plea for Pure Science: the Ascendency of Academia in the Making of the English Chemist, 1841–1914,” in The Making of the Chemist, ed. David Knight and Helge Kragh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 107–19. Orland, “Enlightened Milk.” See also a very useful comparison with Brussels: P. Scholliers and P. Van den Eeckhout, “Hearing the Consumer? The Laboratory, the Public, and the Construction of Food Safety in Brussels (1840s– 1910s),” Journal of Social History 44 (2011): 139–55. Alan Rocke, Image and Reality: Kekulé, Kopp, and the Scientific Imagination (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Victorian Britain. This finding tempers Pickstone’s broader narrative of the process by which states became ‘consumers’ of ‘scientific commodities,’ and elucidates the complexity of debates within and among scientific experts in the analytical sciences. This complexity has historiographical implications for how we understand British science, but is perhaps equally suggestive for reinterpreting the role of Britain in larger debates over expertise in the European and Atlantic World.

The SPA and the origins of the ‘conflict of analysis’ As is well known, the 1875 SFDA grew out of stubborn parliamentary deliberations over how to best curb food adulteration, which in Britain date from at least the 1850s.24 The 1875 SFDA reconfigured the existing legislation in three important ways: (1) it required all local authorities to appoint a public analyst—officially defined as persons “possessing competent medical, chemical, and microscopical knowledge”; (2) it stipulated that these posts be approved by the Local Government Board; and (3) it allowed traders and manufacturers to dispute certificates of local public analysts by sending disputed samples to the government laboratory of the Inland Revenue Service.25 The latter, enclosed in Section 22 of the 1875 Act, colloquially known as the “Somerset House Clause,” proved to be the most controversial aspect of British anti-adulteration legislation in the Victorian period. Seen by Members of Parliament, the Somerset House Clause was a vital protection against the potential but proverbially inaccurate certificates issued by local public analysts. So vociferous were debates on the aptitude of public analysts during the 1874 committee that Augustus Voelcker (1822–1884), Frankfurt-born, Liebig-trained Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirenchester, went as far as to issue the bold, yet overly dramatic claim that there were not a dozen men in all of Britain that would make competent analysts. “A good deal of mischief,” Voelcker pleaded before the 1874 committee, “has been done by the so-called analysts, and the food analysts have been the greatest enemies of the Food Act.”26 “The favourite denouncement,” the more sympathetic Sanitary Record noted in 1875, “hurled at the poor public analyst is that he is the prosecutor of, the informer against, and the spy upon the recalcitrant shopkeeper. That the analyst is always lying in wait to injure honest reputation.”27 Such was the rhetoric, yet there was substantial push back from public analysts, some of whom were present as scientific witnesses at the parliamentary debates in 1874. These included Alfred Allen, Theophilus Redwood, and James Alfred 24

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French and Phillips have seen it as a watershed, noting that the SFDA “was to form the basis of food law in the United Kingdom until 1955.” See French and Phillips, Cheated not Poisoned, 1. The 1874 committee found that of 171 boroughs and fifty-four counties, only twenty-six boroughs and thirty-four counties had appointed public analysts. On the extent of disputed samples sent to the government laboratory, see Hammond and Egan, Weighed in the Balance, 339. Testimony of Augustus Voelcker, Report of the Select Committee on the Adulteration of Food Act, 1874 (15 June 1874), Minutes of Evidence, Parliamentary Papers, 284. Anon., “Food Analysis and its Assailants,” The Sanitary Record (6 November 1875): 337. The Sanitary Record claimed that the attack against public analysts was one largely waged by the popular press, and mostly exaggerated.

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Wanklyn. Wanklyn (1834–1906), Liebig-trained Professor of Chemistry at the London Institution and an early spokesman for public analysts, wryly suggested that the Somerset House Clause “might indeed have emanated from the office of Mr. Punch.”28 The system would simply dissolve, as many public analysts like the candid Allen, Public Analyst for West Riding, keenly foresaw, into one where “local analysts are to be stultified, and no credence given to their certificates or evidence till endorsed by the chemists at Somerset House.”29 For rank and file analysts, the legal dictum looked like a piece of professional hand-holding. More problematic was their belief that the government chemists practised a different kind of analytical chemistry. While the Somerset House Clause quickly became a catalyst for antagonising the relationship between public analysts and the government chemists, growing institutional and even intensely personal hostilities also contributed to widening the professional gap. From the late 1860s, as Christopher Hamlin has shown, Wanklyn was caught in a feud with Edward Frankland in a dispute over water analysis. Wanklyn’s ‘ammonia process’ was pitted against Frankland’s ‘combustion process’ in a sophisticated debate that foreshadowed Wanklyn’s involvement in disagreements over milk analysis.30 Though Wanklyn had been trained by Frankland in the 1850s, mentor and student had radically diverged by the 1870s. As the Public Analyst for Buckingham, Peterborough, High Wycome, and Shrewsbury, Wanklyn believed himself to be more attuned to the practical problems of analytical chemistry, and thus to the institutional thrust of the SPA. Frankland, for his part, worked closely with James Bell and with Voelcker, and Bell often sent his young laboratory assistants to undergo further chemical training with Frankland.31 Frankland, Voelcker, and Bell, moreover, were all leading members of the Institute of Chemistry. Matters escalated in late 1874 when a group of around twenty-five public analysts, led by Theophilus Redwood, Charles Heisch, and George Wigner, met to bemoan the potential threat of the Somerset House Clause. Seeking to protect the interests of public analysts, they formed the SPA.32 From 1874 to 1876, reports and proceedings of the SPA were published in Chemical News, edited by the sympathetic William Crookes. SPA coverage quickly became too much for Crookes, however, and in 1876 the SPA formed its own specialty journal, The Analyst. The aim of The Analyst, as outlined in the first issue, was twofold: to communicate up-to-date knowledge about scientific methods in analytical chemistry, and to

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Anon., The Chemical News (24 July 1874): 39. Anon., The Chemical News (24 July, 1874): 38. On the feud between Wanklyn and Frankland over water analysis, see Hamlin, A Science of Impurity, 184–90. On Edward Frankland’s water analysis, see Edward Frankland, Water Analysis for Sanitary Purposes (London: John van Voorst, 1880). On Wanklyn’s water analysis, see J. A. Wanklyn, Water Analysis: A Practical Treatise on the Examination of Potable Water (London: Trubner & Co., 1868). See also Colin A Russell, Edward Frankland: Chemistry, Controversy, and Conspiracy in Victorian England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), particularly on 374–80. See also Hammond and Egan, Weighed in the Balance, 88–90. William Crookes, who was an early supporter of the SPA, detailed the initial meeting in The Chemical News for 14 August 1874. For a general overview, see R. C. Chirnside and J. H. Hamence, The Practising Chemists, ch. 1.

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publish cases of adulteration, parliamentary proceedings, and other matters “though not scientific, [but] of vital interest to Public Analysts as such.”33 The formation of the SPA was an attempt to institutionalise one vision of analytical chemistry; the group sought to standardise analytical techniques and advance a particular type of scientific practice. It was a means of protecting the interests of local public analysts against the newly appointed government laboratory, an antagonism that lay at the heart of its institutional ethos. The professional mission of the SPA, as set out at its initial meeting in 1874, was to pursue three aims: 1. To promote and maintain the efficiency of the laws relating to adulteration. 2. To promote, and as far as possible to secure, the appointment of competent public analysts. 3. To improve the processes for the detection and quantitative estimation of adulteration, and to secure uniformity in the statement of the results by holding periodical meetings for the reading and discussion of original papers on chemical and microscopical analysis, especially with reference to the detection of adulteration.34 Moreover, the SPA was formed in part to elevate the status of analytical chemists, and to distinguish “actual practicing chemists” from “amateur and theoretical ones,” including medical practitioners such as Medical Officers of Health who might lack analytical training.35 Despite accusations from agricultural chemists, such as Voelcker, and M.P.s, it seems as though public analysts too were concerned with the problem of incompetent analysts. Crookes was aware of the irony, noting in The Chemical News that the aim of the SPA was the “exclusion of incompetent and dishonourable intruders,” “the maintenance of a strict professional ethic,” and “the elevation of the professional status.”36 One of the earliest statements by the SPA was a formalised definition of what constituted adulteration, in relation to articles which, Contain any ingredient which may render such article injurious to the health of a consumer. If it contain any substance that sensibly increases its weight, bulk, or strength, unless the presence of such substance be due to circumstances necessarily appertaining to its collection or manufacture, or be necessary for its preservation, or be acknowledged at the time of sale. If any important constituent has been wholly or in part abstracted, without acknowledgement being made at the time of sale. If it be a colourable imitation of, or be sold under the name of, another article.37

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Anon., “Society of Public Analysts,” The Analyst 1 (1876): 1. The Chemical News (11 December 1874): 268. The early records of the Government Laboratory from the 1820s can be found at National Archives, DSIR 26/91. The Analyst 1 (1876): 19. The Chemical News (14 August 1874): 69. The Chemical News (11 December 1874): 269.

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Having a shared standard of what constituted adulteration was crucial to unifying public analysts throughout Britain.38 It was both a practical necessity and a philosophical stance on the science of adulteration. From the mid-1870s until the end of the nineteenth century, practising public analysts spent a majority of their professional time analysing cow’s milk. As such, the scientific authority of public analysts on matters of milk adulteration largely rested upon a standardised methodology. In the case of milk, the ‘Wanklyn process’ served as the primary method used by public analysts. Because the Wanklyn process was a measure of the constitutive properties of milk, it was conducive to the fixing of universal standards.39 In Milk Analysis, Wanklyn had argued that a fair measure of normal, genuine milk was nine per cent solids not fat, and 2.5 per cent solids fat.40 When the SPA formed in 1874 they officially adopted Wanklyn’s standards, which Allen called “fair and extremely liberal to the milk dealer,” and one that was “very safe not to inflict hardship on the dairyman.”41 Establishing a shared milk standard was crucial to public analysts, because, as Allen, an early leader of the SPA, argued, As there is no more important article of diet than cows’ milk, and as no kind of food is more subject to adulteration, it becomes a matter of the greatest importance to Public Analysts, as well as to milk consumers, that a safe and proper standard of the quality of cows’ milk should be generally accepted. Such a standard is a great desideratum on many grounds.42

The views of an overwhelming majority of public analysts were in line with Allen’s remarks. In practice, however, the adoption of universal standards further pitted local public analysts against the Somerset House chemists. At stake in the disagreement between the SPA and the government chemists was professional status vis-à-vis the guardianship of scientific methodology and authority. The conflict was over whose conceptualisation of adulteration was more scientifically viable; it was enacted within specialist scientific periodicals, in Victorian courts, and in the popular Victorian press. The crux of the argument made by public analysts against the government chemists was that before the 1870s the latter were only experts in analysing taxable goods, namely tobacco, snuff, tea, and alcohol. The 1875 Act provided that the government chemists act as referees for all disputed cases of adulteration, the most frequently adulterated commodities being milk, butter, and bread. Public analysts maintained that the government 38

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The SPA’s standard was widely covered in the medical periodicals of the time. See, for example, Anon., “The Standard of Milk Adulteration,” The Sanitary Record (2 January 1875): 8–9. Wanklyn’s Milk Analysis was widely reprinted, particularly in America, where in some places the ‘Wanklyn Standard’ was codified into law. In a meeting before the Society of Arts, Wanklyn noted in 1875 that milk analysis was “now better known and more certain in its indications than any other branch of the analysis of food.” J. A. Wanklyn, “Milk and the Adulteration Act,” Journal of the Society of Arts 23, no. 1165 (19 March 1875): 392–97, on 392. See also Anon., “Milk Analysis and the Government Adulteration Act,” The Sanitary Record (3 April 1875): 230. Alfred Allen, “Milk Standards,” The Analyst 1 (1876): 45–46. Wanklyn’s standards remained the official ones of the SPA until the 1890s, when they formally adopted 8.5 per cent solids not fat and 3 per cent solids fat as the official standards. Allen, “Milk Standards,” 40.

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chemists had neither experience nor expertise in the analysis of these foodstuffs— rhetoric waged against public analysts as well—but the debate was most vociferous over milk. As I shall argue below, while public analysts’ fears were of very real concern, in reality Bell and the government chemists had undertaken a substantial investigation of the methods of milk analysis and the normal range of variation in cow’s milk.43

A defence of pure chemistry: James Bell and the Somerset House Laboratory By the 1880s, the Government Chemical Laboratory at Somerset House was the leading centre of analytical research in Britain. In a private memorandum written to the Treasury in 1884, James Bell reported that in 1873 alone the laboratory analysed a little over 14,000 samples, rising by 1884 to over 24,000 samples per year.44 There were four classes of officers in the laboratory: Bell, the Principal, who made £900 pounds per annum; Richard Bannister, Deputy Principal, who made £550 (rising after five years to £650) per annum; analysts of the first class; those of the second class; and keepers of chemicals. First and second class analysts, as Bell explained in a private memorandum to the Treasury on 18 May 1877, were selected from among the best Officers of the Excise—those involved with the inspection of breweries, distilleries, and tobacco manufacturers—who had also undergone a course of training in chemistry at the South Kensington School led by Frankland.45 Bell was born in 1825 at Altnamaghan, outside Belfast, and joined the Somerset House Laboratory in 1846 as George Phillips’ assistant. He was taught chemistry at University College London by the German educated A.W. Williamson, and became Laboratory Principal upon Phillips’ retirement in 1874.46 Within the government laboratory, Bell and his staff used a process of milk analysis that was similar to Wanklyn’s, albeit to their understanding more effective. Richard Bannister, Bell’s longtime assistant, later called the process of milk analysis used in the laboratory the “maceration method,” while public analysts largely relied on the “coil method.”47 Both measured the constitutive properties of milk, although boiling and separating techniques diverged. In addition to methodological differences, interpretive practices separated local analysts and the government chemists. Officially Bell never set a chemical limit for how his laboratory assistants were to consider a sample of milk adulterated. He did, however, routinely warn his assistants that 43 44 45

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Hammond and Egan, Weighed in the Balance, 90–91. Memorandum from James Bell to Treasury, dated 15 September 1884. National Archives, DSIR 26/134. Memorandum from James Bell to Treasury, dated 18 May 1877. National Archives, Inland Revenue Service, DSIR 26/133. K. R. Webb, “James Bell, 1825–1908,” Journal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry 82 (September 1958): 582–85. On Williamson, see J. Harris and W. H. Brock, “From Giessen to Gower Street: Towards a Biography of Alexander William Williamson (1824–1904),” Annals of Science 31 (1974): 95–130. Evidence of Richard Bannister, dated 11 July 1894. Report from the Select Committee on Food Products Adulteration 253 (1894), Minutes of Evidence, Parliamentary Papers, 38–39.

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samples which registered below 8.5 per cent non-fat solids and 2.75 per cent fat should be suspected as adulterated.48 Therefore, Bell understood each case as contingent. Pure, unadulterated milk, Bell thought, varied according to cow species, feeding practices, milking patterns, environmental conditions, time of year, and a myriad of other factors. He taught his chemists to examine a wide range of factors even if a milk sample fell below a particular value. When compared to the practices of public analysts of the SPA, Bell may be seen to have had a fundamentally different vision of the role of analytical chemistry. By refusing to adopt a fixed standard of pure milk, the Somerset House chemists were frequently the object of scientific debate. This was in spite of an ongoing and extensive investigation from 1874 into the constituents of milk. Bell was ostensibly secretive in his laboratory practices, informing neither the public nor the SPA of his methods in determining the constituents of milk, nor how the government chemists determined a sample to be adulterated. Examining the archival records of the government laboratory from this period reveals the tenuousness of Bell’s position as a result of the Somerset House Clause. Given the legal nature of proceedings against accused traders and manufacturers, Bell routinely received advice from W. H. Melvill, Solicitor of the Inland Revenue, who helped him sort through the legal aspects of Section 22 of the 1875 SFDA.49 “We are required,” Bell noted in a letter to West Bromwich officials in 1876, “to perform a duty identically with the duty of the public analysts.”50 The West Bromwich case was a disputed one much in line with the Manchester case introduced above.51 In private correspondence to local West Bromwich officials, for example, Bell was adamant that his legal role was to certify whether an article was adulterated or not, regardless of the opinion of the local public analyst. He was also keen to clarify, in this case and many others when he spoke to upset local officials, that “in the majority of cases our conclusions confirm those of the public analysts.”52 Though consensus was more common than most public analysts realised, it is important to note that this was in spite of differing methodology and interpretation between the government chemists and local public analysts. Bell and his staff faced rather different methodological problems to local public analysts, particularly in the case of milk, which quickly decomposes. “It is very important that milk samples should be analysed with as little delay as possible,” Bell wrote, for “in a very 48

49 50 51

52

In official testimony before the Select Committee on Food Products Adulteration in 1894, Bannister nicely summarised the Laboratory’s position, noting that “the word ‘standard’ is a very awkward word to use.” Bell and Bannister preferred the word ‘limit’ instead, although Bannister made it clear that the Laboratory used the ‘limits’ of 8.5 and 2.75 per cent. See the evidence of Richard Bannister, dated 11 July 1894. Report from the Select Committee on Food Products Adulteration 253 (1894), 51. See also memorandum from James Bell to Treasury, dated 8 August, 1893. National Archives, Inland Revenue Service, DSIR 26/133. W. H. Melvill to James Bell, 21 June 1876. DSIR 26/118. James Bell to Matt F. Blakiston, Clerk of the Peace, West Bromwich, dated 24 June 1876. DSIR 26/118. The Analyst covered the West Bromwich case as well, attacking Bell and the government laboratory and siding with E. W. T. Jones, the local Public Analyst. See Anon., “West Bromwich Milk Case,” The Analyst 1 (1876): 74–78. James Bell to Matt F. Blakiston, Clerk of the Peace, West Bromwich, dated 24 June 1876. DSIR 26/118. Mining the data from this period, Atkins has found that 33.1 per cent of milk certificates issued by public analysts were challenged by Somerset House in the period from 1876 to 1890. See Peter Atkins, Liquid Materialities, 96.

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short time there may be a loss of 4 or 5 tenths in the percentage of solids not fat.”53 So important was the issue of decomposition in analysing milk that Bell’s laboratory began the most extensive tests in Britain on the chemical decomposition of milk. They experimented on milk kept for different lengths of time to provide a guide on how to analyse samples that had undergone decomposition. Bell even devised his own formula for allowing for decomposition, an issue explored below. Bell was accused at the time of using secrecy as a barrier to cooperation and cohesion amongst analytical chemists in Britain.54 Archival evidence suggests that initially Bell was more willing to cooperate with local analysts. In an 1876 letter to the West Bromwich officials, for example, who had asked for the official chemical standard of milk purity used in the government laboratory, Bell made it clear that he was not yet ready to divulge such information. He did not, however, obstruct cooperation with local officials, replying that, I am sorry that I cannot send you at [the] same time a similar paper on milk for being anxious to make our investigation into the subject of milk as extensive as possible we are still engaged in procuring and analysing genuine samples. In the meantime however if you should be in town and call I shall be very happy to show you the results the analyses of some hundreds of samples. From these I think you will see how difficult it is to draw a hard and fast line with regard to any simple constituent of milk, and that the entire results require to be carefully considered as a whole.55

As of 1876, Bell was still open to the possibility that an official standard of milk purity might be fixed, and thus unify the practices of the government laboratory and local public analysts. So concerned was Bell that he spent several years studying milk, hoping to elucidate a semblance of standardisation. Yet, as early as 1877 he was convinced that such a public standard was not possible. While the standardisation problem was not specific to milk—local officials wrote to Bell extensively in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s to request the ‘official’ standard for bread, butter, brandy, gin, and other commestibles—milk loomed the largest in such debates.56 One of the claims made against Bell by public analysts was that he was sympathetic to those in the milk business: dairymen, traders, and vendors. Bell indeed considered that the role of the government laboratory was to protect honest dairy producers: “the adoption of say 9 percent of solids not fat as a minimum amount,” wrote Bell, admonishing Robert McAlley, the newly appointed Public Analyst for Falkirk, in 1877, “would inflict a serious hardship on many honest vendors of milk.”57 Yet, it would be over-simplistic to claim, as his contemporary detractors did, that Bell’s goal was solely to protect those in the dairy business. 53 54

55 56 57

James Bell to Matt F. Blakiston, Clerk of the Peace, West Bromwich, dated 24 June 1876. DSIR 26/118. See, for example, E. W. T. Jones, “West Bromwich Milk Cases,” The Analyst 1 (1876): 75. In the 1890s, the same complaint was still being made. See Anon., “Items of Interest,” Food, Drugs, and Drink 1 (20 August 1892): 8. See also Hammon and Egan, Weighed in the Balance, 93. James Bell to Matt F. Blakiston, Clerk of the Peace, West Bromwich, dated 18 October 1876. DSIR 26/118. See Bell’s extensive correspondence to local officials. DSIR 26/118. James Bell to Robert McAlley, March 1877. DSIR 26/118.

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On 13 July 1877, Bell received a letter from the largest dairy cooperative in Britain at the time, the Manchester and Salford Milk Dealers Association. George Jackson, the association’s secretary, wrote to Bell pleading that there was “a very urgent need” that the “government would adopt a universal standard,” preferably in accordance with that used by local public analysts.58 In one of his most explicit and lengthy replies on the standardisation question, Bell responded that “the more the subject is investigated the more I am convinced of the difficult of adopting a fixed quantity of any particular constituent as a standard which in determining the genuineness of a milk would be alike just to the milk trade and to the consumers.”59 Unlike other cases, where Bell was rather curt in his replies, he expounded on the extensive results of his ongoing investigation into milk quality and composition. In the short period 1875–1877, for instance, Bell’s laboratory examined over three hundred individual cows, and twenty-four dairies. The experimentation was both unprecedented and wide-ranging. Cows were selected from London and various other parts of the country, and Bell’s assistants witnessed the milking process to guarantee that no adulteration had occurred. The British public, Bell claimed, had been “led to suppose,” presumably by both dairy farmers and public analysts, that cow’s milk remained relatively constant, and thus that a standard could be fixed. Public analysts, we should recall, had adopted fixed standards of the composition of pure milk for practical reasons that had much to do with both public health and adducing guilt in Victorian courts. We can see here two very different visions of analytical science in the late Victorian period.

Attempts at unifying analytical chemistry Owing to the frequency of ‘conflicts of analysis’ in the late Victorian period, the SPA reached out to Bell’s laboratory, attempting to unite both methods and interpretations of milk purity. The first of several formal efforts by the SPA in this respect was a letter written to Bell on 22 January 1878, where the group invited Bell and his assistants to give a lecture “upon the standards you have adopted in your Laboratory for the analysis of butter, milk, and other adulterated articles.”60 The SPA desired to learn more of Bell’s methods, no doubt, but they were also keen to remove further conflicts of interest, representing to Bell that the SPA and the Government Laboratory should not “differ either in the interpretation of the Act, or in the interpretation of the results obtained in analyses made under the Act.”61 Bell replied within a week, and after “careful consideration” was adamant that “the object you have in view would not be likely to be attained by the course proposed.”62 It is 58 59 60 61 62

George Jackson to James Bell, 13 July 1877. DSIR 26/118. James Bell to George Jackson, 13 August 1877. DSIR 26/118. SPA, signed by secretaries C. Heisch, J. W. Wigner, to James Bell, 22 January 1878. DSIR 26/118. SPA to James Bell, 22 January 1878. DSIR 26/118. James Bell to SPA, 30 January 1878. DSIR 26/118.

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important to note that while Bell was uninterested in a public display of his methods, he was not uncooperative. He ended his 1878 letter to the SPA by making it clear that his investigations into milk “have at all times been open to the inspection of any Public Analyst who has chosen to call upon me … I shall be glad to see any member of your Society who may feel disposed to favour me with a visit.”63

The Manchester Milk Case under further examination The conflict of analysis raged into the 1880s, vehemently displayed in private letters between analytical chemists, in food and agricultural journals, and in the scientific press. It also manifested perhaps most strikingly in Victorian courtrooms. Here there is an opportunity to return to the Manchester Milk Case. When the Manchester Court reconvened on 6 October 1883 to hear evidence from Charles Estcourt and James Bell, it also called upon several other scientific witnesses in some way involved in the case, including Wanklyn, Wigner, and Voelcker. The court also questioned the well known chemists Otto Hehner, August Dupré, Oswald Wilkinson, and Alexander Wynter Blyth. The expert witnesses represented the elite of Victorian analytical chemistry, making the Manchester Milk Case a useful case study with which to explore tensions in analytical science.64 It was here, at the Manchester Sessions Court, that the conflict of analysis described in this article was fully on display. Mr William Court Gully, Q.C., barrister for the Manchester Corporation and later Speaker of the House of Commons, opened the proceedings by appealing to the expert authority of the SPA. Estcourt’s analysis of Wardle’s milk as adulterated with four per cent water was, he argued, “not only Mr. Estcourt’s opinion, but the opinion universally acted upon by the Public Analysts in this country.”65 Upon samples of his milk being taken by the local nuisance inspector for analysis, Wardle privately employed Otto Hehner, Public Analyst for South Derbyshire, and Oswald Wilkinson, Public Analyst for Stockport, on 27 April 1883, to conduct what he considered to be an independent analysis. Unlike Bell, who was not to receive the Wardle samples for almost a month, Hehner and Wilkinson analysed the milk in its fresh state. Furthermore, again unlike Bell, both confirmed the conclusion arrived at by Estcourt, that Wardle’s milk had been adulterated.66 Both Hehner and Wilkinson relied on the vision of analytical chemistry common to the SPA, of which they were members. The timing of the analysis of milk samples lay at the heart of the Manchester Milk Case, and highlights both practical problems in milk analysis, and the performative aspects of how science was communicated to public bodies in nineteenth-century Britain. While there was little consensus between local public analysts and the 63 64

65 66

James Bell to SPA, 30 January 1878. DSIR 26/118. Several of the individual chemists listed here had been in conflict with either Bell or Voelcker. A. Wynter Blyth, eminent Medical Officer of Health and Public Analyst for Marylebone, who also was a qualified barrister, was in a feud with Bell in late 1882 over a conflicted analysis of butter. See DSIR 26/118. The Analyst 8 (November 1883), 187 (hereafter The Analyst 8). See, for example, the evidence of Wilkinson and Hehner, The Analyst 8, 206–208.

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government chemists as to what constituted adulteration—the battle, as we have seen above, was over whether an absolute standard could be enforced—we have to take seriously the methodological differences between analytical chemists. The issue, fully demonstrated during the Manchester Milk Case, was how the Government Laboratory was to deal with decomposed samples, a problem not exclusive to milk, but of general concern. Bell’s original analysis of Wardle’s milk, fully twenty-one days after Estcourt’s analysis, revealed sample 203, for example, to have 8.20 per cent solids not fat and 2.80 per cent solids fat, a figure strikingly lower than the analyses of Estcourt, Wilkinson, and Hehner. Yet, Bell’s standardised process at the government laboratory by the mid-1880s was to allow for the process of decomposition by adding 0.4 per cent for the twenty one days the milk had decomposed.67 In this way, Bell’s figures on sample 203 were raised to 8.60 per cent solids not fat, nearly matching Escourt’s original 8.67 per cent figure. Opposing Bell’s process of adding for decomposition, the public analysts at the Manchester Milk Case claimed that Bell’s technique had “no scientific basis whatever.”68 When directly asked by court officials whether analysing decomposed milk was possible, Estcourt said, in no uncertain terms, “I find from my experience that it is impossible.”69 Hehner, in his testimony agreed. “You can never arrive with the same certainty at any result,” he added, “and when a certain point has been reached in decomposition it is an impossibility.”70 Wanklyn contemptuously noted that Bell and the Somerset House chemists had “a very bad method indeed” in allowing for milk decomposition.71 Agreeing with Estcourt and Hehner, he thought that Bell’s compensation for decomposition was absurd and unreliable. Wanklyn criticised the fact that Bell’s method “could not detect 20 percent” of water added, let alone the four per cent Bell was analysing in the Manchester case. This was also an opportunity for the combative and egotistical Wanklyn to display his own status in the larger profession. Wanklyn spoke of “my method,” predicated on an “immense body of work—my work,” and one “almost universally adopted” by public analysts, although not, of course, used by the government chemists.72 As an object of chemical analysis, milk was an unstable product, meaning that Estcourt and Bell were at some level testing differently constituted milks. When the materiality of milk is coupled with the methodological problem that groups of analytical chemists differed on techniques, and with the interpretational problem that they also disagreed on the limits for milk purity, we can better situate the volatile

67

68 69 70

71 72

Bell had a standarised system for allowing for decomposition. He reasoned that milk lost 0.24 per cent in the first seven days. Over the next fourteen days it lost another 1.0, and 0.01 for every following day. The Analyst 8, 188. The Analyst 8, 195. The Analyst 8, 207. August Dupré, Professor of Chemistry at Westminster Hospital, Public Analyst for the Westminster Board of Works, and part-time consultant for the Medical Department, agreed as well, calling the analysis of decomposed samples “perfectly useless.” See The Analyst 8, 209. The Analyst 8, 202. The Analyst 8, 204.

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nature of such conflicts of analysis. However unfair it may have been to condemn Bell’s practices as ‘unscientific’—and we can only understand such a charge within the context of performance, of vying for professional credibility—his certificates were nonetheless represented as unreliable before late Victorian courts. This charge depended a great deal on the decomposition problem, but also on the more fundamental issue that analytical methods differed between the government chemists and most rank and file members of the SPA. Estcourt called Bell’s methods of milk analysis “entirely different” and argued both that his results were “uncertain” and that they elevated the fat content of samples.73 As an important moment in the late Victorian conflict of analysis in analytical chemistry, the Manchester Milk Case can also be seen as a fulcrum in debates between the SPA and the government chemists, as the first public demonstration of Bell’s laboratory methods. It was during the court proceedings that Bell presented one of his laboratory notebooks before the court as evidence. Prior to this, as explained above, Bell had been particularly tight-lipped regarding his practices at the Somerset House Laboratory. Bell also first clarified, albeit to a limited audience, his methods for allowing for decomposition, defending the practice as “perfectly scientific.”74 At stake was the reliability of Bell’s calculations; despite Estcourt, Hehner, Wanklyn, and Wigner all having declared the process untrustworthy, the Manchester court officials were nonetheless faced with evidence that Bell, independently of Estcourt, Wilkinson, or Hehner, had arrived at a similar analytical result. To the court officials, the analytical methods may have differed, yet the results were the same. The decomposition question, in other words, was put aside. Such agreement was not sufficient to resolve the case. Though “the results are the same,” Mr Cottingham, the appellant’s barrister, argued before the court that, “the scientific conclusions to be drawn from those results are toto caelo different.”75 It was to the interpretation of such analytic results, then, that the court turned its attention, as both Estcourt’s analysis and Bell’s (when allowing for decomposition) fell below the SPA standard of nine per cent solids not fat and three per cent solids fat. Bell was keen to couch the language of his official analytical certificates in the measured tone of impartiality. In the Manchester case, Bell simply was “unable to affirm from my examination of this decomposed milk that there has been adulteration.”76 This is not to say that Bell avoided conflict or controversy. During the Manchester proceedings he was vociferous in attacking the out dated methods used by public analysts, who still followed the method devised by Wanklyn. Mr Cottingham characterised such methods as “obsolete,” and Bell’s methods at the government laboratory as more “modern.” By institutionalising a standard of nine per cent solids not fat, Cottingham argued, the SPA in practice denied the variation in normal, pure, cow’s milk. By 1883, Bell’s research on cow’s milk had expanded to 73 74 75 76

The The The The

Analyst 8, Analyst 8, Analyst 8, Analyst 8,

196. 217. 220. 189.

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the analysis of thousands of samples of genuine milk, and demonstrated that nearly forty per cent of milk samples fell below nine per cent of solids not fat; 14.9 per cent even fell below 8.6 per cent solids not fat.77 The Somerset House Chemists, led by Bell, and local public analysts, led by the SPA, held two competing visions of analytical chemistry. As we can see in the Manchester Milk Case, this was partly to do with conflicting laboratory practices. Yet divergence in analytical methods reveals a deeper fissure within the fledging science. Bell was less interested in affixing a universal standard of milk—a practical solution that public analysts understood to be part of their emerging disciplinary identity—than in the research question of “ascertaining or investigating variations in the composition of milk.”78 Whereas the majority of public analysts assumed that milk which fell below nine per cent solids not fat was evidence of skimming with water, Bell noted that “when you go below 8.5 I think there should be some evidence on the part of the defendant that the milk is genuine.”79 The differences were practical as well as epistemological: public analysts were pushing for a universal standard in order to prove adulteration, while Bell and the government laboratory deliberately avoided universal limits in order to expand their research programme. Bell, for his part, was not especially interested in adducing guilt on the part of dairymen and milk sellers. Bell and the government chemists also had important allies among the analytical and agricultural chemists. Augustus Voelcker, the only expert witness to side with Bell during the Manchester case, was as adamant as he had been in 1875 before the SFDA Parliamentary Committee that affixing a universal standard was both dangerous and unfeasible. Although his views were in line with those of Bell and the government laboratory, Voelcker astutely observed that the conflict of analysis rested upon a fundamental difficulty, namely that chemists could not “distinguish between naturally poor milk and watered milk.”80 So little faith did Voelcker place in analytical chemistry in deciding cases of adulteration before the courts that when asked just how public analysts were to ultimately adduce certificates of adulteration, he commented, “I am glad I am not a Public Analyst to have to decide that question.”81 The Manchester court decided to uphold Wardle’s appeal and the case was dismissed. “I must take into consideration not only the scientific evidence,” the final decision read, “but the facts of the case,” namely, Wardle’s

77

78 79 80 81

Bell’s laboratory had obtained samples of milk from individual cows at dairies in Keddleston, located nearby to the defendant Richard Wardle’s farm. Bell’s analysis of seventeen cows at Keddleston showed an average of 8.70 per cent solids not fat and 3.21 per cent of solids fat: The Analyst 8, 224. This is not to say that public analysts were uninterested in milk-related research. Estcourt himself confirmed before the Manchester Sessions Court, that he analysed 500 milk samples per annum. Moreover, in the early 1880s the SPA comprised the so-called ‘Milk Committee,’ which visited model dairy farms such as the Aylesbury Dairy Farm. See Anon., “The Protection of the Milk Supply,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 1042 (18 December 1880): 989–90, Anon., “Report of the Milk Committee,” The Analyst 10 (1885): 216. The Analyst 8, 225. The Analyst 8, 225. The Analyst 8, 234. The Analyst 8, 234.

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oath that he did not water the milk, and that he employed independent analysts who judged against him.82 The SPA’s organ, The Analyst, devoted an entire issue to the Manchester Milk Case in 1883, using the widespread publicity of the case to “expose the deception which has been played on the Somerset House Chemists, [and] that we shall hear the last of this nonsense.”83

Conclusion Conflict between the SPA and Bell’s laboratory continued for at least another decade. In 1892, the SPA again reached out to Bell, asking that he adjust the language used by the government laboratory when certifying disputed samples of milk and butter. By then the request was much more direct; the SPA urged Bell to state more clearly, for example, that analysis could only at best suggest the purity of decomposed samples. In their 1892 letter, the SPA also made it clear to Bell that he was undermining the authority—the scientific expertise—of local public analysts. “We feel strongly,” the SPA’s secretary urged, that the terms in which your opinion is given should be as fair to the Public Analyst as to the Trader. By the mode of statement hitherto adopted by you, the public has, we fear, been led to the belief that, while your Department stands impartially between the Public Analysts and the Tradesmen, the Public Analyst is not himself an impartial personage.84

There was nothing new in such private critique of Bell and the government laboratory. Bell, for his part, waited two months before replying to the SPA, and even then was his typical, brusque self, noting, perhaps to suggest incredulity at the SPA’s effrontery, that, “there would be serious objections to our making any such additions to our certificates.”85 Yet, in a bizarre turn only one year later, in 1893 Bell accepted the invitation to speak before the SPA’s annual meeting, where he was the evening’s honoured guest. He prophesied that the era of antagonistic relations between the two groups of chemists was over; and by the 1930s Bernard Dyer noted that the two now sat “side by side.”86 What are we to make of Bell’s change in tone? Was it rhetorical supplication, professional politeness on a formal occasion, or an actual professional reconciliation in analytical chemistry? While local public analysts were at the forefront of public science in the late nineteenth century, James Bell and the government chemists often sat on the backbenches. Where the former interacted with consumers, traders and manufacturers, and public officials, the latter were typically ensconced in the isolation of Somerset House as civil servants. Both groups urged greater visibility for analytical chemistry, 82 83 84 85 86

The Analyst 8, 238. The Analyst 8, 185. For an extended discussion, see P. W. Hammond and H. Egan, Weighed in the Balance, ch. 9. SPA to James Bell, September 1892. DSIR 26/118. James Bell to SPA, 29 November 1892. DSIR 26/118. Bernard Dyer, The Society of Public Analysts and other Analytical Chemists, 40.

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despite the fact that they disagreed as to its public utility. In addition to practising, both groups also actively performed analytical chemistry, and vied to persuade and cajole various audiences that they were independently producing sound science. The conflict between these two groups supports what Colin Russell and others have noted about the professionalisation of chemistry in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly with regard to the internal conflicts within the branch of analytical chemistry.87 Lyon Playfair, the eminent chemist and public defender of science, had declared during the parliamentary debates over food adulteration in the 1870s that “the time has now arrived when science must be trusted in government.”88 Increasingly, both the British public and the British government put faith in science—including analytical science—to resolve fundamental problems of health, urban living, agriculture, and the environment. Yet, as we have seen, Playfair’s plea for trust in science was made against the background of deep-seated internal conflict in analytical science. One way to understand such internal disagreements during this period is by following the rhetoric of expertise and examining the performance of chemistry, in order to see how chemists communicated scientific knowledge. This, of course, is part of a much larger historical phenomenon, and we need not, as Harry Collins has argued, expect scientific expertise to reveal scientific consensus.89 The conflict explored in this article helps us to rethink the process by which scientific credibility was forged from the nineteenth century. The feud between local public analysts and government chemists exposes an episode of frustrated professionalisation, of grasping at credibility in Victorian courts, even though it was ultimately questioned and often set aside.

Acknowledgements A previous version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society. Chris Hamlin provided critical feedback and lively discussions, and Sally Kohlstedt read and commented on an earlier version. I would also like to thank the Editors of Ambix for expert guidance as the manuscript went through revision, and the anonymous reviewers, who offered invaluable advice on making this a stronger paper.

Notes on contributor Jacob Steere-Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the College of Charleston. He completed his Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota in 2010. Address: College of Charleston, Department of History, Maybank HAll 310, 66 George Street Charleston, South Carolina 29424, USA. Email: [email protected] 87 88 89

Russell et al., Chemists by Profession, 106–7. Lyon Playfair, “An Address on the Progress of Sanitary Reform,” British Medical Journal 2 (10 October 1874): 461. H. M. Collins and Robert Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 2 (2002): 235–296, on 241.

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