2 - Child Health in the Industrial Workplace

Summary

It is crucial that the occupational health of early industrial children is set within an analysis of the complex epidemiology of early factory towns. However, specific occupational ailments amongst working children were often explained in terms of particular aspects of work practices and environments. Accounts of the effects of work upon the body were based upon long-established medical knowledge. Most eighteenth and early nineteenth-century doctors expressing opinions about the health of working children tended to draw largely upon theoretical approaches by established authorities such as Ramazzini who, in the late seventeenth century, had ascribed industrial ailments to two major sets of causes:

The first and most potent is the harmful character of the materials that they handle, for these emit noxious vapors and very fine particles inimical to human beings and induce particular diseases; the second I ascribe to certain violent and irregular motions and unnatural postures of the body, by reason of which the natural structure of the vital machine is so impaired that serious diseases gradually develop therefrom.

Charles Thackrah's studies of occupational health, for example, were heavily influenced by Ramazzini's theories about materials and ergonomics and for much of the early nineteenth century the debate about the health of mill and factory children revolved around the relative importance of these major factors.