Volume 8

The Health Exhibition literature : Health in relation to civic life. Vol. VIII.

  • International Health Exhibition (1884 : London, England)
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Health Exhibition literature : Health in relation to civic life. Vol. VIII. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    impossible. Sometimes its development in one hand has compelled the sufferer to learn to write with the other hand. Unfortunately for him, however, the affection is apt to spread from one side to the other. Scrivener’s palsy is only the best-known, and perhaps the commonest, of a group of spasmodic or paralytic affections to which persons who have acquired skill in the use of particular groups of muscles are liable. The pianist, the swordsman, and others whom it is needless to enumerate, suffer from analogous disorders. The sketch of industrial diseases which I have given is short and necessarily incomplete. I cannot pretend that I have consulted all the literature on the subject which has accumulated during the last few years; and my personal studies are limited to two or three inquiries which I con- ducted many years ago for the medical officer of the Privy Council, and to the casual material which has been afforded me by my position as an officer of health and physician to a large hospital. It is probable, therefore, that there are some well-known industrial diseases with which I have no acquaintance ; and, with respect to some of those which I have brought under your notice, I cannot speak with any certainty as to what their present prevalence is as compared with their prevalence years ago. Moreover, I have not ven- tured to enter at any length on the important question of their prevention. I console myself, however, with the con- sideration that it would have been utterly impossible for me, even if my knowledge of the subject had been profound, to give an adequate account of industrial diseases in the limited time placed at my disposal; and that my paper will be completed and corrected by the observations it will doubtless elicit from those whose knowledge, of at any rate particular parts of the subject, is much more intimate and much more recent than mine.