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the influence of unsteady habits. Still it is not improbable that any tendency to
kidney disease may be due to the same habitual chilling of the skin which favours the
occurrence of phthisis. Young butchers always seem to me to be leading an uncomfortable
sort of life.
12. Printers.—We have twice our proper share of these living in Islington. Their
seven years' death-rate is 769 per 10,000, or 107 per annum. Their expectation of
life is very low—only 24 years. Our printers seem to have suffered disproportionately
from fatal fevers and from that class of diseases to which erysipelas belongs, as if
indeed, their work places exposed them, in some way that I cannot understand, to putrid
miasmata; but it may be that their degraded health renders them more liable than any
others to suffer from miasmata, to which they are exposed elsewhere. They have a
high mortality from acute inflammations of the chest, probably from sudden alternations
of temperature; and they show nearly the largest proportion of deaths from heart
disease, very likely the result, through rheumatic fever, of the same cause. Printers,
according to Dr. Edward Smith, are considerably liable to take cold. They stand
pretty high also in fatal diseases of the liver and kidneys, and nearly a third of the
deaths are from phthisis. The compositor comes off worst in the latter respect; for
while, among those engaged in other branches of the business, only 21'6 per cent, of
the deaths are attributed to consumption, the compositors' deaths from it form 42'4
per cent, of all their deaths. They suffer much at the same rate from heart disease
as do those following other branches of the business. Heins Van Holzbeeck
enumerates, as the principal cause of disease among printers, impurity of the
atmosphere from gas, moisture, and turpentine, crowding and working at night. Dr.
Edward Smith adds to these causes, in the case of the compositor, dirt and bad ventilation
in the workrooms, overwork, unsteady habits, and metallic poisoning from the
type. The dust from the "cases" has been found to contain lead, copper, antimony, and
arsenic. The men are the more likely to suffer from this in consequence of their
frequently taking one or two meals in the room in which they work.
13. Commercial Clerks.—I have much difficulty in dealing with these; because it
is not once a commercial clerk, always a commercial clerk. It is a class formed in
large proportion of educated young men of a respectable rank in life, who, after a
time, enter into more advanced grades of commercial life. Still our table tells a sad
tale respecting them. The death-rate, for the reason above assigned, cannot be relied
upon ; but it is very evident that if young men entering upon the life of a commercial
clerk, as they do on leaving school, continue in it and rise no higher, they have at the
age of 20 a reasonable expectation of only living 18 years. Out of 198 deaths I have
on record over 20 years of age (and I hava a vast number under that age), no less
than 69 (more than a third) took place within ten years ; and more thaa a third of
the deaths of those left and continuing their occupation took place within the next
10 years. Looking at the causes of death of these persons, we must be struck with
the fact of 46 4 or nearly half the deaths being produced by consumption. The deaths
from syphilis, delirium tremens, and kidney diseases point to dissipated habits of life.
But to what is this high fatality from consumption due ? I believe mainly to two
causes, which it is for employers to remove, if the high pressure at which business is
carried on now-a-dayi will permit of it. In the case of clerks employed all day, tied