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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    the figures for Berlin are taken, there were between 1900 and 1909 on an average 376 men off ill per year; if 100 members only are considered, 46^9 men were off ill per year—8'ii of these from plumbism. The smaller number of cases of lead poisoning among the Vienna painters who were employed on inside work is to be explained by the circumstance that other metals than lead were being used in the paint: for if similar lead paint had been used internally as externally, the cases would have been more numerous. That is the conclusion we come to from the following : In Vienna, for internal painting, there were used annually 1,600 hundred- weights of white lead. This amount of material caused 163 cases of lead poisoning. For outside painting 4,750 hundredweights were used, and this gave rise to 50 cases of lead poisoning. In the United States it was found that 1 in every 6 painters, and in Austria 1 in 4, gave a history of having had plumbism in one or other of its minor forms ; but, bearing in mind what has been stated in the preceding pages regarding the increase in the number of drying agents now used, it is more than probable that part of the illness the men suffered from was of the nature of an intoxi- cation from turpentine and its congeners, or from carbon monoxide, as suggested by Gardner, rather than lead ; for if there is one circumstance peculiar