The effects of arts, trades, and professions, and of civic states and habits of living, on health and longevity : with suggestions for the removal of many of the agents which produce disease, and shorten the duration of life / by C. Turner Thackrah.

Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The effects of arts, trades, and professions, and of civic states and habits of living, on health and longevity : with suggestions for the removal of many of the agents which produce disease, and shorten the duration of life / by C. Turner Thackrah. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    25/258 (page 11)
    ter-men, their wives, and their errand-hoys, almost all eat fresh-cooked meat, at least twice a day. They are plump and rosy. They are generally also cheerful and good- natured. Neither does their bloody occupation, nor their beef-eating, render them savage, as some theorists pretend, and even as the English law presumes. They are not subject to such anxieties as the fluctuations of other trades produce; for meat is always in request; and butchers live comfortably in times as well of general distress as of gene- ral prosperity. They are subject to few ailments, and these the result of plethora. The atmosphere of the slaughterhouse, though suffici- ently disgusting to the nose, does not appear to be at all injurious to health. The mere odours of animal substan- ces, whether fresh or putrid, are not apparently hurtful; indeed, they seem to be often decidedly useful. Consump- tion is remarkably rare among the men employed in the slaughterhouse. If we see a phthisical youth in the fra- ternity, we shall generally find that his parents, aware of an hereditary disposition to consumption, brought him up to the business with the hope of averting this formidable malady. The atmosphere of the slaughterhouse, imbued with a foreign admixture, is moreover less susceptible of those natural changes, which produce epidemics. From this circumstance, conjoined with their diet and habits of life, butchers are less subject than other trades to Cholera and Dysentery. To the same favourable combination, we attribute their comparative exemption from diseases, con- sidered as infectious or contagious. Of 520 patients taken to the House of Recovery in this town, during a year, only one was a butcher, and his was a case not of typhus, but of simple fever.* * Dr. Txveedie, in his late publication on Fever, has a similar remark : “ Though almost every description of mechanics has been at some period or other admitted last year into the Fever Hospital, I do not recollect a single instance of a butcher being sent to the establishment.”