STS Research Seminar - Dr Rebecca Wright (Northumbria) - 16th January 2019

On Wednesday 16th January, Dr Rebecca Wright (Northumbria) will visit the department to give her talk "68 Degrees: Health, Energy and Politics in New York City’s Residential Heat and Hot Water Code, 1918-1968". The talk will begin at 4.30 in Malet Place room 1.2, with refreshments available from 4pm.

Abstract:

At a meeting in October 1918, New York City’s Department of Health added a new resolution to its Sanitary Code. All steam-heated apartments and office spaces within the city had to be maintained at 68 degrees minimum with an adequate supply of hot water. The establishment of a minimum ordinance for steam-heated apartments continues to be written into New York City Law, as part of the city’s Residential Heat and Hot Water Code. This has preserved the 68 degrees minimum for tenanted residencies during the heating season. Over its hundred year history this law has gone through many modifications: dropping to 65 degrees between 1942 and 1956, and having its seasonal parameters and temporal rhythm contested and adapted several times. When adjustments have been made they have not just been about preserving the health of New Yorkers. Rather they have reflected broader pressures in New York’s fuel economy, which experienced periods of shortages, and an energy transition from anthracite coal to oil between the two world wars. Tracing the life of the heating ordinance between 1918 and 1968, this paper will show how fuel and health experts used New York’s ordinance to balance “bodily comfort” with the limits of the physical environment and constraints of the fuel economy. It will show the ways health was used to build in, as well as reduce energy loads and how the contingency of the fuel economy fed into changing paradigms of health and well-being. By demonstrating the ways in which the emergence of New York City’s energy landscape is intimately bound to changing understandings of health and wellbeing, the paper will consider what role the medical humanities can have in the study of energy transitions in the past, present and future.