Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 4.djvu/318

 216 that mining is a very unhealthy occupation, and that miners are subject to a particular disease which affects great numbers of them and shortens their lives. This disease is generally known by the name of the miner's consumption; and its existence and great fatality are readily acknowledged by the miners themselves.

2. The examination of a body of miners, when assembled on any public occasion. cleaned from their ochry defilement and in the dress of the common labourer, impresses the observer with the belief that they are not healthy, and that they are much older than is really the case. It is stated by one of my medical correspondents, resident in a mining district, that an agricultural labourer at forty-five is almost as good as a miner at twenty-five, and the relative appearance of the two justifies this opinion.

3. My own inquiries among miners, and my repeated examination of this class of men, both individually and when collected within and about mines, under ground and at grass, have demonstrated the existence of diseases in a considerable proportion of them, which there was reason to believe would prove eventually fatal to all of them before the ordinary period of natural decay, and which diseases were almost all notoriously the consequence of their peculiar habits and mode of life.

The following table gives a view of the actual state of health of the men employed in a mine, from a personal examination made on the spot by myself, in the year 1821: