Lead poisoning : from the industrial, medical, and social points of view, lectures delivered at the Royal Institute of Public Health / by Sir Thomas Oliver.

  • Oliver, Thomas, Sir, 1853-1942.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lead poisoning : from the industrial, medical, and social points of view, lectures delivered at the Royal Institute of Public Health / by Sir Thomas Oliver. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    British red lead factories 134 cases of plumbism.* In one-fourth of the men the symptoms were severe. Sixteen of the men who had been ill had been introduced into red lead works simply as labourers to sweep up the floors. During the sieving, grinding and packing of litharge, clouds of dust rise. Thirteen of the cases above referred to were furnace-men. One patient was a brick- layer who was reconstructing a flaked litharge furnace. He contracted lead poisoning, and died from it. In one of the factories on the Continent a man who was carrying a small barrel of red lead let the barrel fall. It broke. Immediately the workman was enveloped in a cloud of red dust. Symptoms of acute plumbism developed, followed by paralysis of the extensor muscles of the wrists and fingers, which persisted for several months. Red lead is also manufactured by automatic processes, but, as the machinery is more or less patented, a description of it cannot be given. Suffice it to say that from the time the pig lead is fed into the closed melting-pot at one end, and where it is converted primarily into monoxide, also during its passage onwards through the colouring ovens to the place where it falls as finished red lead into the barrels for packing purposes, the * Special Report on Dangerous and Injurious Pro- cesses, by Dr. Edgar Collis.