Page:How contagion and infection are spread, through the sweating system in the tailoring trade.djvu/13

7 is often carried on in them when some of the inmates are suffering from scarlet fever or some other contagious disease."

The following report of Dr. Thorne Thorne appeared on the 17th March, 1877, in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, in respect to the sanitary condition of Portsmouth, and more especially to the two following cases, viz.:—

"In the overcrowded house of a tailor and dealer in second-hand clothing a child was attacked with scarlet fever. Isolation was impossible, and a second child was attacked, one case terminating fatally." "At the house of another tailor, where several cases occurred, I ascertained that at the date of the outbreak the mother divided her time between nursing her sick children and the manufacture of articles of clothing."

"Many more recent cases are cited in illustration of the danger. In Soho a dressmaker's daughter was recently taken ill with scarlet fever, and lay for a week in a room, where twelve seamstresses were at work all day. She had hardly reached the convalescent state before her mother, in turn, caught the disease. When the medical gentleman arrived he found the girl up, trying to direct the work, and actually handling the dresses, while her mother lay stricken by her side."

"In Marylebone a child recently died of scarlet fever in the room in which his father and mother were working at tailoring."

"Close by a couple were found by the medical attendant busily engaged on a hunting coat, while two of them children, lying in the same room, were suffering from scarlet fever."

"We are told of a bootmaker, living in one room, stitching at boots for the Duchess of Edinburgh, by the bedside of his dying wife."

"It will be remembered that the death of Sir Robert Peel's daughter was traced to the tailors who made her riding-habit in the same room with a fever patient, and Dr. Richardson stated in his recent speech that he had seen a riding-habit thrown over the bed to cover a person suffering from the same contagious disease."

Dr. Royle, who presided at the conference on the subject in Manchester, said he knew and had seen the terrible effects of the evil complained of. Ladies and gentlemen did not know that when they ordered garments to be made in haste, in which they wanted to appear at some ball, or concert, or party, that they not only ran a risk themselves, but carried the same risk to those they held most dear as friends and relatives, by wearing clothes made at firms patronising this system. For himself, he never wore new clothes until they had been hung for some time in a room through which a current of air was passing, and the garments were thoroughly ventilated.