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Water and the city of Milan at the end of the nineteenth century
Abstract
Since the Middle Ages Milan obtained its water supply satisfactorily from shallow wells. Significant problems developed during the nineteenth century, however, prompting the Lombard Institute to announce the Cagnola Award for a three-year study project to analyse the water both chemically and physically and to remedy the problem of pollution. The award was made to Angelo Pavesi (1830–96), a chemist, and Ermenegildo Rotondi (1845–1915), a civil engineer. They concluded that cemetery wastewater should be prevented from entering the city and that the number of deep artesian wells should be increased. Some years later, another problem regarding hygiene and water supply arose and it seemed doubtful whether the principal hospital of the city could fulfil the new hygiene requirements. Pietro Canetta (1836–1903) studied the records of the main hospital's water supply and disposal from 1457, demonstrating that it could be regarded as a model for the supply of good-quality water and for wastewater disposal without polluting the city. Since 1906 all of Milan's drinking water has been derived from groundwater; untreated wastewater continued to be discharged into rivers until 2004 but since then all water has been treated.
... The water theme is continued by Porro et al. (2016) in their consideration of the ways in which the complex needs of the Milanese water supply system were addressed at the end of the nineteenth century. Shallow wells provided the Milanese with drinking water of sufficiently good quality to maintain metropolitan health until industrialization of the city took place following the establishment of rail linkages. ...
Medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century takes on some characteristics of modernity. These characteristics are worthy of our attention because they help us to understand better some of the current problems of hygiene and public health. One of the topics that was most discussed in the scientific-academic milieu of the second half of the nineteenth century was cremation. There was a poetic precedent: the cremation of Percy Bysse Shelley (1792-1822). The earliest apparatus to completely destroy the corpse was made in Italy and Germany in the 1870s. As far as hygiene was concerned, the reasons for cremation were not to pollute the water-bearing strata and an attempt to streamline the cemetery structure. As in an apparent schizophrenia, scientists of the day worked to both destroy and preserve corpses. There is also the unusual paradox that when the first cremations took place, the corpses were first preserved then to be destroyed later. The catholic world (mainly in Italy) and forensic scientists opposed cremation. It was left to the hygienists to spread the practice of cremation. An analysis of scientific literature shows us that if we leave out the related forensic and ethical problems, recent years have seen attention paid to any harmful emissions from crematoria equipment which have poured into the environment. Another issue is the assessment of inadvertent damage which may be caused by the condition of the corpse. Some topics, however, such as the need for preventive autopsies (first proposed in 1884 in Milan) are still a subject of debate, and seem to pass virtually unchanged from one generation to the next.
The early pioneers of chemical engineering in the last two decades of the 19th century were concerned to establish a new profession to support the needs of a rapidly growing chemical industry. This discipline and profession developed as the industry itself grew rapidly to a growing demand from society for the products of the chemical industry. Early practitioners of chemical engineering, emerging from university courses in the early years of the 20th century, quickly found employment not only in those sectors of the chemical industry that had originally served to define the need, but also in other parts of the process industries. The early conceptual basis of chemical engineering, based on "unit operations," enabled the burgeoning discipline to establish itself as distinctive from courses in industrial or applied chemistry and mechanical engineering. This chapter also discusses that the future will try to ensure that chemical engineering realizes its full potential as the broadest and most scientific of the engineering disciplines. The threat of "opportunity overload" is that the chemical engineers will lose focus, and lose contact with their distinctive roots, as they try to deal with an evergrowing range of challenges.
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