Early Industrial-Era Observations

As new industries and chemicals were introduced, new kinds of problems were observed by physicians and scientists. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was concerned about lead poisoning in the printing trades and also published a paper on "dry gripes," or stomach cramps, that he found were caused by drinking rum distilled in lead vessels.

English doctor Percival Pott (1714-1788) linked a high frequency of nasal and scrotal cancer with the occupation of chimney sweep in 1775 and discovered the first occupational carcinogen. And in 1779 German physician Johann Peter Frank (1745-1821) wrote A Complete System of Medical Policy advocating governmental responsibility for clean water, sewage systems, garbage disposal, food inspection, and industrial health under an authoritative "medical police."

A massive social shift from decentralized work in rural settings to centralized workplaces in factory towns took place across Europe in the early nineteenth century with tremendous consequences. Workers who did not move to factory towns found that they had no work, and some took to breaking steam-powered looms in England's Luddite rebellion of 1811-1816.

Those who did move to factory towns found no infrastructure for dealing with clean water, sewage, trash, or even personal hygiene. By the 1830s the accumulating damage began to spark investigations and calls for reform.

In 1831 Charles Turner Thackrah (1795-1833), a British physician, published The Effects of the Principal Arts, Trades and Professions. Thackrah not only made clinical observations about the incidence of disease in the trades, but also suggested improvements. He wrote that glazers, for example, should avoid dipping their hands into lead glaze mix, or even better, that something only slightly more expensive could be substituted.

"Surely humanity forbids that the health of workmen, and that of the poor at large, should be sacrificed to the saving of halfpence in the price of pots," he said. "Evils are suffered to exist even when the means of correction are known and easily applied. Thoughtlessness or apathy is the only obstacle to success" (Hunter 1976, 121).

About the same time during the 1830s, parliamentary commissions began investigating outrageous working conditions common in England. Children were beaten into working sixteen-hour days in textile mills, for example, and were "stunted, diseased, deformed and degraded." The resulting outrage fueled two decades of social and environmental investigations and reform in England and across Europe. The Royal Commission on the Employment of Children in the Mines reported "cruel slaving revolting to humanity" and pushed for passage of the Mines Act of 1842, which prohibited all women and boys under age thirteen from the mines.

The Factory and Workshops Acts, passed around this time and amended throughout the nineteenth century, prohibited women from holding dangerous jobs such as lead and brass manufacturing and children under age eleven from grinding metal. Subsequent acts regulated specific occupational diseases, such as the 1875 law preventing child employment of chimney sweeps and the 1883 Prevention of Lead Poisoning Act.

Reformers in the United States were well aware that growing urban populations and a spreading industrial revolution were taking their toll. In 1842 New York City physician John H. Griscom wrote the report entitled "The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York City" (Burrows & Wallace 1999,785). He found that a lack of sanitation, water, and decent housing made it hard for workers and families to keep clean.