Horrible Health and Safety Histories: Erethism or Mad Hatter Syndrome
When the Huguenots (Calvinist French Protestants forced to leave France after the Edict of Fontainbleu, which made Protestantism illegal in France) arrived in Britain in the late seventeenth century they brought with them a new method for making felt, and a new occupational disease – erethism, or mad hatter syndrome. The new method involved the […]
Read MoreHorrible Health and Safety Histories: Child Labour
Child labour was common long before the industrial revolution. Working class children were required to work in order to help support their families, even if this was only by helping their parents to tend their land. With the industrial revolution, however, the amount of jobs that children could be hired to do grew exponentially. In […]
Read MoreHorrible Health and Safety Histories: Disorders of Railway Travel
Due to the increasing use of the railway as a means of transport in the nineteenth century, as well as the common occurrence of railway accidents and compensation claims made by passengers, a growing amount of work was done in the 1860s into the disorders caused by railway travel. This work was led by the […]
Read MoreHorrible Health and Safety Histories: Cotton Mills
‘Poisoned by the Fluff’: The Dangers of Nineteenth-Century Cotton Manufacturing In the early 1830s Dr James Phillips Kay exposed cotton as a common killer. After treating many workers from cotton mills, he noticed that many of his patients complained of bad lungs. He wrote that in many of the people he saw, ‘Entrance into the […]
Read MoreHorrible Health and Safety Histories: Penny Licks
Ice Cream Vending With a Drizzle of Cholera and a Sprinkling of Tuberculosis At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the end of the Napoleonic wars saw many Italians move to Britain. They brought with them their own techniques for making smooth, creamy ice cream – gelato. Gelato vendors would go around the streets with […]
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