In recent years, there have been signs that a further transformation of the status and concept of water is under way. In the United States, the authorities responsible for supplying drinkable water are no longer as trusted as they once were (in many parts of the world, of course, such authorities have never known that degree of trust). In some cases that loss of trust reflects a real inability to maintain standards of water quality. But it also reflects public concern about new kinds of contaminants, such as toxic organic chemicals, viruses, and giardia (McCleary 1990; Hurst 1991). In some cases the effects of these contaminants may only be manifest after many years and only through use of the most sophisticated epidemiological techniques (Hand 1988). Nor are customary methods of water analysis or approaches to water purification yet well adapted to such contaminants.
The response of the public has been to revert to a technology, the home water filter (or other water purification devices), that had been popular in the nineteenth century before water authorities were trusted. For some, drinking water has again become a commodity that we think we must go out of our way to secure; something that we haul home in heavy fat bottles from the supermarket. Yet these responses are not adequate to the problem of trustworthiness. The capabilities of domestic water purification devices vary enormously, as does the quality of the product sold by the bottled-water industry and the degree of inspection it receives (Fit to Drink? 1990). Indeed, these responses say less about our need for water we can trust than they do about the institutions we trust.
The rise of the elite bottled mineral waters industry is a reversion too. Pliny tells us that the kings of Persia carried bottled water taken from the River Choapsis with them (Burton 1868: 242); Herodotus and Plutarch referred to an export trade in bottled Nile water - some of it used by devotees of the cult of Isis and Osiris (Wild 1981: 91-4). Such trade was still widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then, as now, quality control was a problem and customers complained about the excessive price (Kirkby 1902;Boklund 1956;Coley 1984).
The revival of this industry makes it easier for us to appreciate the fine distinctions among waters made by Pliny, Vitruvius, and the medieval and early modern therapists of the regimen. Modern elites have agreed with their predecessors that the taste (can one say bouquet?) of a water really is important, and that through the drinking of fine waters one can cultivate one’s health in ways far more delicate than simply keeping one’s insides moist and avoiding cholera.
Christopher Hamlin
World History
