Water Purity, Health, and Expertise: Debating Fluoridation in Vancouver during the 1950s

Abstract

Whether or not to fluoridate community water supplies challenged communities across North America and beyond in the mid-twentieth century. Proponents of fluoridation argued that this public health measure could prevent dental caries at little cost and should be embraced; critics objected to what they considered to be mass medication, and an unwelcome intrusion of the state and experts into matters of personal health. While many communities across Canada participated in this fraught question, and the contours of the debate from place to place shared many features, fluoridation was always a local issue, tied to the community water supply. In Vancouver, a wartime controversy over whether to chlorinate the water supply had shaken faith in expertise and the state. The fluoridation debate thus followed a wider public reckoning over water purity, health, authority, and expertise, and gave the many shared features of the national fluoridation debate a different quality. While fluoridation was embraced in many North American communities, or at least accepted, in Vancouver the foundations of the debate in the 1950s weakened support for this public health measure in defence of pure water and against the advice of experts.