The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. Ramblinactivist 2022/19, 24th May 2022'Silent Spring' is an historically significant book, its hypothesis proven right, its message undimmed. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. Part II draws heavily on the unpublished records of the Food and Drug Administration to document how the ineffective handling of this danger established precedents for present pesticide abuses. In Part I, the agricultural and medical literature of the past century is used to analyze the emergence by 1920 of a public health danger of serious proportions. The author shows how economic necessities, technological limitations, and pressures on regulatory agencies have brought us to “our present dilemma of seemingly having to poison our food in order to protect it.” The book examines the period before the publication of Rachel Carson’s famous Silent Spring, tracing the origins of the residue problem and exploring the complicated network of interest groups that formed around the issue. Whorton’s history of this public health menace emphasizes that insecticides have been contaminating produce since the introduction of chemical pesticides in the 1860s.

Modern consumers are well aware that the food they eat is tainted by pesticidal residues they are less aware that their great-grandparents faced the same hazard.

Silent spring book