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.

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    alehouse that money, which would be better employed in buying solid food. The attention of masters might do much to correct the evil. Dray or Wherrymen, persons who attend on the low carriages which carry heavy goods in towns, have, in addition to the long-continued walking of cart-drivers, great exertion in lifting weights. Having higher wages, they are more addicted to intem- perance. They complain occasionally of an uneasiness in the feet and loins, which appears to result from their labour,—of headache, and disorder in the urinary organs, which are evidently the effect of frequent potation, and of the variety and often bad quality of the ale they chink. Their constant exercise, however, in the open air, and early rising, seem to check the advance of disease; for wherrymen are generally robust, and attain considerable age. Labourers in Husbandry, Sand Leaders, and Men employed on the Roads, would be healthy, were their means of subsistence adequate to their wants. But a man who has himself, his wife, and family to support on twelve or sixteen shillings a week, cannot be well fed. Hence this body of men are far less robust in figure, than we should expect from the nature of their employ. They are subject to disorders of the digestive organs, and generally suffer also greatly from epidemics. Brickmakers, with the advantage of full muscular exercise in the open air, are subject to the annoyance of cold and wet. These, however, appear little, or not at all injurious. Brickmakers, half naked, and with their bare feet in the puddle all day, are not more liable to catarrh, pneumonia and rheumatism, than men whose work is under cover and dry. Of twenty-two brickmakers of whom we made personal inquiry, only one had been af- fected with rheumatism, or could state himself subject to any disease. All declare that neither rheumatism, nor any