C URRENT LITERATURE.
DANGEROUS TRADES.
Dangerous Trades: the Historical, Social, and Legal Aspects of Industrial Occupations as Affecting Health. By a Number of Experts. Edited by Thomas Oliver, M.D., Medical Expert on the White Lead, Dangerous Trades, Pottery, and Lucifer Match Com- mittees of the Home Office ; Professor of Physiology, University of Durham. (John Murray. 23s. net.)—For more than two generations the British Parliament has been striving in its charazteristically casual and intermittent fashion to protect various sections of our working people against injuries to health and life incident to their occupations. The important book before us shows how very far we still are in these respects from being in a position to regard public needs as having been satisfied or public duty as fulfilled. Here we see clearly set forth and explained by expert Nrriters—in several cases by the editor, Professor Oliver, himself—the tremendous price at which what we are pleased to call civilisation—at least, on its material side—is secured. How would ordinary domestic life, as we know it, be possible without china and earthenware, without cutlery, without glass, without soap, without fine linen? We should feel ourselves back in the Dark Ages. But our fellow - countrymen die every year in large numbers in order to keep us at our present level of comfort and refinement in these respects. The potter's trade is still one of the unhealthiest in the country. The dangers of lead-poisoning in that industry have been considerably reduced under the operation of special rules enforced by the Home Office.; but, greatly owing to the breathing-in of irritant dust, "the mortality of potters from bronchitis is more than four times as high, and that from other respiratory diseases is three times as high, as the mortality of occupied males in the aggregate." The mortality among cutlers is "enormous," being higher than the average of other occupations, between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five, by 59 per cent. It is mainly caused by inhalation of metallic particles. Among glassmakers the average death-rate is exceeded by 56 per cent.—very largely in consequence of exposure to extreme variations of temperature—and in their case, as in that of the cutlers, there has been an increase in mortality between 1881 and the latest records. Again, in regard to the chemical industry—of which soda, required in such vast quantities for soap-making and other familiar things, and bleaching powder are among the princi- pal products—Principal Laurie, writing very carefully and temper- ately, feels constrained to recognise that though its death-rate is lower than that among the cutlers and earthenware and glass workers, it "comes high up among the unhealthy trades." These are but a few examples of the continued prevalence of more or less gravely unhealthy conditions among industries which have long been regarded as indispensable. Another quite equally so, that of the laundress, is shown in Miss Deane's very interesting chapter to be undergoing, indeed to have undergone, so remarkable a mechanical transformation as to call imperatively for the pro- tection of those engaged in it from the dangers now developed. Another rapidly growing occupation—that of the generation of electricity for purposes of lighting and power—is shown to be charged with dangers of the most deadly character to the work- men engaged in it. In the case of this industry—for the protec- tion of the workers wherein it is acknowledged that many precautions have been introduced during the last few years—and of some others which we have mentioned, and several more to which we have no space to refer, the readers of this volume will find care- fully weighed and moderate suggestions for the development of the law, or of the regulations which the Home Secretary has power under its existing provisions to prescribe, with a view to the prevention, as far as may be, of disease and accident. Both editor and publisher deserve, we think, the most cordial acknowledgments for the contribution they have made to the education of public opinion on matters vital to our national security and prosperity. We cannot conclude without saying that, disliking as we do any needless interference with the work of adults of either sex, the extremely serious contributions of Mrs. H. J. Tennant and Dr. George Reid on infant mortality have gone far to convince us that there ought to be a legislative prohibition of the industrial employment of women away from their homes for several months after childbirth.
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