Horrible Health & Safety History Archives | Amalgamate Safety Risk Management

Horrible Health and Safety Histories: Match Manufacturing

When we think of the nineteenth century we tend to think of it as the age of steam – the age of the steam engine, steam-powered factories, and iron and steelworks. In order to produce this steam, an easy source of ignition was needed. Up until the nineteenth century, fires would be lit with a […]

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 […]

Horrible Health and Safety Histories: Dust Explosions

Dust – a seemingly innocuous substance that makes many people sigh as they think about having to get out the feather duster. Yet as several high profile campaigns over the last couple of years – such as IOSH’s No Time to Lose campaign – have highlighted, breathing in many kinds of dust, especially those created […]

Horrible 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 […]

Horrible 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 […]

Horrible Health and Safety Histories: The Invention of the Railway

The invention of the steam locomotive in 1804 led to an entirely new industry and a vast variety of new workplace risks. The first railway line to allow a steam locomotive, built between Stockton and Darlington and opened in 1825, followed by the first inter-city passenger railway introduced between Liverpool and Manchester only five years […]

Horrible 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 […]

Horrible 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 […]