2.1The notebook against the report
Geison's book sets two kinds of record against each other. Pasteur's laboratory notebooks were opened to scholars in the 1970s, and from them Geison argues that Pasteur's public accounts differed from his private research (Geison 1995). Before treating Meister, Pasteur had not tested on dogs bitten by rabid animals the particular series of inoculations he used on the boy, and his published report led readers to believe otherwise. Geison raises the ethical questions this poses, and grants the treatment's outcome: the boy lived.
For the present question, this article reads Geison's argument as one about evidence: the report's persuasive force came partly from a test it let readers infer, and that test, as inferred, had not been run. The dispute is over which evidence existed, and over the distance between the report and the bench.
2.2The network that makes facts hold
Latour's book starts from the other end. On its note, Pasteur's successes depended on alliances: hygienists, physicians, veterinarians, the army and others took up the microbe because it served their own projects, and laboratory results were made to hold outside the laboratory by extending the laboratory's conditions into farms and hospitals. Scientific facts spread through such networks rather than by their own force (Latour 1988).
The notes this article works from do not set the two books against each other. Set side by side here, they point to different parts of the same report: Geison to the distance between Pasteur's published account and his private research, Latour to the alliances on which Pasteur's successes depended and to the extension of laboratory conditions beyond the laboratory. Whether an act was won by evidence or by alliance is this article's question, not one either note poses.
2.3A handle on a falling curve
Vinten-Johansen and his colleagues' biography treats the other act. On Broad Street it shows that Snow persuaded the parish Board of Guardians to remove the pump handle; that the outbreak was already declining when the handle was removed; that Snow himself did not claim that the removal ended the outbreak; and that his case rested more on the comparison of households supplied by different water companies. It also traces how slowly the medical establishment accepted his theory (Vinten-Johansen and others 2003).
Read beside each other, the handle and the slow acceptance are two different outcomes: a local act by a parish board, taken the day after Snow spoke, and the acceptance of a theory by a profession. Asked of Broad Street, the question of evidence or alliance depends on which outcome is meant.
2.4The surrounding arguments
Five further works mark out the ground on which the two acts stand, each used for what its note says and no more.
Erwin Ackerknecht argued that the anticontagionism that dominated medical opinion in the mid-nineteenth century was tied to liberalism and to commercial interests opposed to quarantine, while contagionism and quarantine went with bureaucratic, absolutist states, and that the scientific case was not settled when these positions were taken (Ackerknecht 1948). Snow's argument that cholera was spread by a morbid matter taken in by mouth, chiefly through contaminated water, as the reading note on his book puts it (Snow 1855), was made in that period.
Charles Rosenberg, in Explaining Epidemics, distinguishes explanatory styles in which disease is read as configuration, an imbalance of the whole person and environment, or as contamination, a specific agent passing between people (Rosenberg 1992).
Theodore Porter argues that quantification is a technology of distance: rules for counting and calculating let communication reach beyond a community of trust, and such rule-following is pursued most by weak or contested experts and by bureaucracies under outside pressure, as a substitute for personal trust (Porter 1995).
Harry Marks, writing about the United States between 1900 and 1990, argues that the controlled clinical trial grew from therapeutic reformers' distrust of the individual physician's judgment and of commercial claims, and that its authority was built over decades by collective, controlled experiment (Marks 1997). His period begins after Meister's treatment, and he is used here only as a contrast.
Sheila Jasanoff holds that the science used for regulation differs from research science, since it must produce answers under time pressure and uncertainty, and that a decision's legitimacy depends on how advisers and agencies negotiate the boundary between science and policy (Jasanoff 1990). Her subject is twentieth-century American regulation; her distinction is borrowed, with that caution, for two acts each taken within days.
2.5The debate side by side
What each note says bears on the two acts as follows.
| Point | Geison (1995) | Vinten-Johansen and others (2003) | Latour (1988) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Object | Pasteur's public accounts against his laboratory notebooks | Snow's life and the Broad Street handle | Pasteur's successes in France |
| Claim | Before treating Meister, Pasteur had not tested the particular series on dogs bitten by rabid animals, contrary to what his report led readers to believe | The handle was removed on a declining outbreak; Snow did not claim the removal ended it; his case rested more on the water-company comparison | Successes depended on alliances; laboratory results held outside the laboratory by extending its conditions; facts spread through networks, not by their own force |
| On the outcome | Grants the treatment's outcome while raising ethical questions | The decline came before the removal | Not addressed in the note |
In none of the three notes does the outcome of an act serve as proof of it: Geison grants the boy's survival and still questions the report, Vinten-Johansen and colleagues place the decline before the removal, and Latour's note speaks of alliances and networks, not results. The two reports, it turns out, say as much themselves.