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heated at little gas-stoves placed on work tables. Cardboard box makers
and frame makers use gas to heat the glue, and the smell of the glue, added to
the fumes of the gas, makes these workshops particularly unpleasant. In all
these trades, a hood and flue, or other means of carrying off the injurious
products of combustion, should be provided.
(B) Laundries and Receiving Offices—
The presence of steam and the excessive heat from stoves for irons and
gas-heated irons and machines, and defective floors in wash-houses, are the
principal sources of ill-health in laundries. In receiving offices, the rooms
used for sorting dirty linen are small and badly ventilated.
(C) Factories—
As compared with workshops, the particular danger of factories lies in the
nerve strain caused by the "unceasing competition of sensitive human nerve
and muscle against insensitive iron." The nerve tension involved in working
electrically-driven sewing machines making 4,000 stitches a minute must be
acute.
(D) Restaurants—
Basement kitchens are dark and badly ventilated, and the air admitted is
usually charged with dust and impurities from the streets. Aboveground
kitchens are comparatively healthy.
(E) Offices—
An increasingly large number of women work as clerks in typewriting
offices, as telephone operators, and in various other capacities. The offices
are often dark and badly ventilated. More serious is the menace to health
caused by the absence of suitable sanitary accommodation for the lady clerks
which obtains in the majority of these offices. The gradual undermining of
health, with consequent anaemia and neurasthenia, are the least evils which
result. Too often serious internal injury is caused, and the harm done does
not end with the girls themselves. Outside London, the matter is dealt with
by Section 22 of the Public Health Amendment Act, 1890, which requires
the provision of separate sanitary accommodation in every building where
persons of both sexes are employed in "any trade or business"; but there
appears to be some doubt as to whether Sections 37 and 38 of the Public Health
(London) Act, 1891, which deal with the provision of sanitary conveniences,
can be enforced in regard to offices. If these Sections are held not to apply
to offices, it is surely time that, by fresh legislation, London should be brought
into line with the rest of the country in a matter of so vital importance to
health.