Malignant menace

摘要

In the book The Water Babies, by Charles Kingsley, Little Tom falls into a river and changes into a miniature merman. This may have saved him from a rather gruesome fate, since Tom was a 'climbing boy' - a trainee chimney sweep, who would climb up narrow chimneys to clean them. In 1775, the English surgeon Sir Percival Potts gave the first account of a work-related cancer, which affected chimney sweeps. Cancer of the scrotum must have been a particularly aggressive disease, since in 1831 CT Thackrah wrote that"...few live to the age of 50." As the industrial revolution progressed, mule spinners were noted to develop the same disease, and similar growths affected other parts of the skin of shale-oil miners and coal-tar distillers. Little could be done to control the disease, since there was complete ignorance of the biology of cancer and the vast majority of the population exposed to the hazard had poor access to baths, or freshly laundered working clothes. In any case, workplace health and safety legislation of the 19th century was dominated by the hazards of acute poisoning and high accident rates in the mines, and was enacted in a piecemeal fashion in an economic system that minimised the role of government.