Why Drink Water?

In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui River was designated as having the same rights as a human person. The decision drew upon Maori belief in the animate status of nonhuman beings and depended on the legal power of a Western state. This article examines those two factors in relation to the history of drinking water as an essential part of human diet, focusing on early modern England/Britain. In the early modern period, water was stripped of a life-giving force with which earlier European authorities (not unlike the Maori) had endowed it, even as water was becoming a generic component of a recommended diet—recommended, not least, by state authorities. Medical interpreters who published their works in English distanced themselves from definitions of matter that had considered water as itself vital, and instead defined the material components of a healthy diet, including water, in terms that avoided any hint of vitalism. Encounter with the dietetic advice of other cultures did not revive belief in water’s vitalist properties; rather, that advice was assimilated to new expectations that beverages, especially water, should maintain a cool body and temperament. These transformations took place in an imperial context. It was the Royal Navy that declared the minimum units of drinking water necessary for humans (meaning its sailors), which was a historically novel development. To uncover these trends is to explore how change occurs, and therefore how it might occur in the future, as state power may more frequently need to align with beliefs in animate nature that today are mostly non-Western beliefs, in order to protect natural features and resources, not least for human health.