Industrial Diseases
Introduction
The Greater Manchester region’s history of heavy industries and often poor working conditions led to major problems of industrial disease.
Until the 20th century, industrial disease was not treated as a special category of illness. There was greater concern about routine industrial accidents and the prevalence of infectious diseases at the societal level. Gradually improving living standards meant that diseases specific to particular industries started to attract attention.
Interest in some industrial diseases followed from more general developments in a particular area of pathology. There was also a complex interplay of political, economic, legal and intellectual factors in determining how industrial diseases were understood and tackled.
Cotton industry diseases
Mule spinners’ cancer was a type of a cancer which had first been identified amongst chimney sweeps in the 18th century. It was a skin cancer caused by continuous contact with the carcinogenic oils used in oiling spinning mules. As a great deal of oil was used on machinery, there was a high incidence in the workforce.
Sydney Henry, the medical inspector of factories for Manchester, campaigned area for recognition of this disease. His statistical studies established the link between the oils and incidence of cancer. He was supported by the spinners’ trade unions and the Manchester Committee on Cancer, and in 1930, mule spinners’ cancer became a registered industrial disease. Non-carcinogenic technical white oils were developed as replacements but these were not made compulsory in the industry until 1953.
A lung disease, byssinosis, was particularly prevalent amongst workers who prepared raw cotton for spinning. This activity produced huge amounts of cotton dust, which over prolonged periods was harmful to the respiratory function, and caused disabling injuries. Although it was a known problem in the Mid-Victorian period, it was not until the 1940s and 50s that ventilation systems which removed the dust became standard. Workers affected also won disability benefits. Two figures important in the campaign against byssinosis were the factory inspector Samuel Hird and Ronald Lane, the professor of industrial health at the University of Manchester.
There were also occupational diseases in weaving. The practice of shuttle kissing, where weavers pulled thread through the eyes of the shuttle by their teeth, was suspected of spreading tuberculosis (rates of which were very high in Lancashire weaving communities). This practice was not fully prohibited until 1952. Deafness was however the greatest threat due to prolonged exposure to the incessant noise of the weaving sheds. It was also one of the last diseases in the industry to be tackled.
One of the major problems in tackling these diseases was that the official responses — through government inquiries, factory inspection and legislation — were usually slow-moving. Problems were addressed by suggesting better working practices; some employers complied but others resisted for long as possible. Improved equipment tended to be expensive, and this was not attractive to an industry which from the 1920s was in long-term decline. Outright prohibition of unsafe practices, if it happened at all, tended to lag several decades after a problem had first been identified.
Ronald Lane, Professor of Industrial Health
Manchester’s experience in dealing with occupational diseases was recognised in 1945 when the University of Manchester established the first chair in industrial health (occupational medicine) in the UK. Ronald Lane (1897–1995) was appointed to this post, and he proved very successful not only in tackling particular diseases but also raising the reputation of the subject within the medical community.
Lane’s areas of expertise were remarkably broad, and included poisoning by heavy metals, asbestosis, occupational rheumatism and deafness. He was a key figure in demonstrating the links between cotton dust and incidence of byssinosis. He established Manchester’s Occupational Health Service which brought practical scientific and medical expertise to the study of occupational disease. Ironically, by the time many industrial diseases were properly studied, the industries in Greater Manchester which caused them were disappearing.
Additional Resources
John Pickstone, Medicine and Industrial Society: a History of Hospital Development in Manchester and Its Region, 1752–1946 (Manchester 1985)
John Singleton, Lancashire on the Scrapheap: the Cotton Industry, 1945–70 (Oxford 1991)
Related Blog Posts
“A Doctor’s View of Industrial Manchester” 3 December 2015
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