The Home Office And The Dangerous Trades

This book is the first in-depth study of occupational health in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. As such it is an important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the history of health in the workplace. It focuses on the first four diseases to receive bureaucratic and legislative recognition: lead, arsenic and phosphorus poisoning and anthrax. As such it traces the emergence of medical knowledge and growth in public concern about the impact of these diseases in several major industries including pottery manufacture, matchmaking, wool-sorting and the multifarious trades in which arsenic was used as a raw material. It considers the process of state intervention taking due account of the influence of government inspectors, ‘moral entrepreneurs’ and various interest groups.

In Dangerous Trades, Thomas Oliver set out to compile all the available knowledge about the kinds of industrial health and safety issues that existed in every workplace in the late 19th century, and suggest remedies for these problems.

From anthrax to asbestos to pesticides, industrial toxins and pollutants have troubled the world for the past century and longer. Environmental hazards from industry remain one of the world's foremost killers.Dangerous Trade establishes historical groundwork for a better understanding of how and why these hazards continue to threaten our shrinking world. In this timely collection, an international group of scholars casts a rigorous eye towards efforts to combat these ailments. Dangerous Trade contains a wide range of case studies that illuminate transnational movements of risk—from the colonial plantations of Indonesia to compensation laws in late 19th century Britain, and from the occupational medicine clinics of 1960s New York City to the burning of electronic waste in early twenty-first century Uruguay. The essays in Dangerous Trade provide an unprecedented broad perspective of the dangers stirred up by industrial activity across the globe, as well as the voices rasied to remedy them.

This book offers a comparison of the origins of the welfare state in England and Germany (1850-1914).

Focusing on occupational ill-health in relation to women, this book examines the relationships between gender, work and illness from 1880 to 1914. It looks at the part played by feminist activists in debates about health and industrial work and shows how they went beyond the concerns of suffrage.

Focusing on the years between the identification of bacteria and the production of antibiotic medicine, Wall presents a study into how bacteriology has affected both clinical practice and public knowledge.