Enquiry into the effects of loud sounds upon the hearing of boilermakers and others who work amid noisy surroundings / by Thomas Barr.

  • Barr, Thomas, 1846-1916
Date:
[1886]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Enquiry into the effects of loud sounds upon the hearing of boilermakers and others who work amid noisy surroundings / by Thomas Barr. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    Enquiry into the effects of Loud Sounds ^cpon the Hearing of Boilermakers and others who work amid noisy surroundings. By Thomas Barr, M.D., Surgeon to Glasgow Ear Hos- pital; Lecturer on Aural Surgery, Anderson's College; and Dispensary Surgeon for Diseases of the Ear, Western Infirmary, Glasgow. [Read before the Society, 3rd March, 1SSG.] It is familiarly known that boilermakers and others who work amid very noisy surroundings are extremely liable to dulness of hearing. In Glasgow we would have little difficulty in finding hundreds whose sense of hearing has thus been irremediably damaged by the noisy character of their work. We have, there- fore, in our city ample materials at hand for the investigation of this subject. In the process of boilermaking, as most of you are aware, four different classes of men are engaged—riveters, caulkers, platers, and holders-on. The riveter drives in with a large hammer the red-hot iron rivets for binding the plates together; the caulker hammers with a chisel the edges of the plates so as to ensure complete tightness; the plater forms the iron plates and arranges them accurately in position; while the holder-on, stands inside the boiler holding a large hammer, the head of which he presses against the inner end of a rivet. These are not all equally exposed to loud sounds, and they differ, therefore, in the extent to which then- ears are affected. The men who work inside the boiler such as the « holders-on, are, of course, exposed to the loudest and most damaging sounds. Their ears are near to the rivet which is being hammered in by the riveter outside. The iron on which they stand is vibrating intensely under the blows of per- haps twenty hammers wielded by twenty powerful men. Con- fined by he walls of the boiler, the waves of sound are vastlv intensified and strike the tympanum with appalling force, wh ,e me: Th Tl T ir°n ^ CUreCtly ^ e of h , men to the delicate nerve structures in the inner ear. If in such enhances, we venture into the interior of a boile, our fit