Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/383

Rh vibrations plus noise act on the nerves as a continual light tapping does on steel. Both steel and nerves disintegrate. One girl said that when her machine stopped at night she always felt like screaming, which proved that her nervous energy was being too greatly sapped by the day's work.

The effect of the strain of industry then is to add mental to physical fatigue, destroying the recuperative power of the body. Since the sexual organs and the nervous system both take the same food elements from the blood and are delicately adjusted to each other, the toll industry takes of the nerves is sooner or later reflected in organic maladjustments.

As with monotonous work, so with industrial diseases no direct result on the fecundity of women can be pointed out. The harm comes indirectly through a lowering of general vitality and nerve strain. Lead poisoning seems to attack women more readily than men. It is a most potent producer of abortion, for it is rare for a woman working in lead fumes to give birth to a healthy child at term. Often the poisoning results in sterility. At first, the odor of carbon bisulphide in a rubber factory makes girls excitable, but it is followed by headache and nervous lassitude, with a loathing for food. As with morphine and cocaine, the cause has the semblance of a cure, a feeling of normality only when drugged. This produces the vicious circle, of poisoning, lassitude and repoisoning. The excitement causes undue fatigue, while malnutrition culminates in poverty of the blood, general debility and organic disturbances. The eating of the hands by acids in pickling factories, bleacheries and soap works tortures the workers and exhausts the nerves. Dust dries the throat. The effort to cough produces asthma or an inflammation which is a good seeding ground for tuberculosis. A hot, damp workroom weakens the body by excessive perspiration, and renders it liable to rheumatism, bronchitis and tuberculosis. Lifting heavy weights or running foot-power machines so injure the sex organs as to induce sterility. This list might be lengthened, but enough has already been written to make the point.

Malnutrition plays a part in lessening the vitality of working women. When a mother has to prepare a breakfast for a family before hurrying away to a shop, that breakfast is to be commended for the speed of its preparation rather than for its adherence to principles of proper diet. Bread and butter, coffee or tea and greasy meat, with the addition of a pickle as a stimulant, is the usual bill of fare, varied but little in the three meals of the day. There is not enough of cooked food and vegetables are lacking. The mother's body is not sufficiently nourished to withstand the double tax of factory work and house work and if a child comes, the mother is sometimes too impoverished physically to nourish it. A baby should be fed every two hours, but a