Germs in the English Workplace, c.1880–1945 by Laura Newman

Author:Laura Newman [Newman, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Medical, Infectious Diseases, Science, Technology & Engineering, Environmental, Pollution Control, Industrial Health & Safety
ISBN: 9780429769184
Google: HMoOEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-02-15T01:39:59+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter has considered how new issues surrounding public health and the changing conditions of the dairy industry helped put science on the educational agenda. As part of this, increasing both prospective and actual dairy farmers’ familiarity with germ life – and the role it played in relation to workplace practices relating to cleanliness, milking, and animal health – was a major aim of colleges such as the MADC. The role the germ sciences played in the education of dairy students at the MADC was, however, a complex one and reflected how the evolution and differentiation of working roles in the dairy was based upon different scales of both theoretical and practical engagement with the germ sciences. Reflecting the broader principles enshrined in the technical education movement, dairying education for the farming classes was designed to be flexible, mobile, and above all practical. Germ practices in the College’s dairy formed the principal means by which the MADC worked to try and bring the germ sciences to students from farming families. Theoretical instruction in the germ sciences, however, often held little interest for all classes of dairying student, and the MADC were restricted in their capacity to expand laboratory-based instruction in the germ sciences, too.

Beyond the College walls, alternative modes of instruction – consultancy work, peripatetic instruction, and so on – did exist and provided Midlands dairy farmers with a means by which to better understand the role that the germ sciences could play in offering new solutions to common working problems. It is questionable, however, how effective such instruction was in enacting significant changes in the ways these workers approached the problem of dairy germs. Nonetheless, the activities of the MADC show there were diverse routes into scientific dairying in this period. Knowledge was circulated through both direct fieldwork and consultation with farmers as well as through more straightforwardly didactic forms of outreach such as public lectures and printed materials, suggesting a relatively large and diffuse educational environment in which Midlands dairy farmers could learn about both germs and the germ sciences. We have seen how the nature of research at the MADC, particularly in the interwar period, concentrated on two major concerns when it came to germs: identification and instrumentalisation. The next chapter considers the complex role played by germs as agents of both destruction and production by looking at the impact the germ sciences had on dairying technology, in turn building up a more complete picture of the often messy relationship that existed between dairying, the germ sciences, and germs in this period.

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