Page:Treatise on poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the practice of physic (IA treatiseonpoison00chriuoft).pdf/443

 Next to miners may be ranked manufacturers of litharge, red-lead and white-lead. The workmen at these manufactories are exposed to inhale the fumes from the furnaces or the dust from the pulverizing mills. It has been chiefly among the workmen of a former white-lead manufactory in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh that I have had an opportunity of witnessing the lead colic. By a simple change the proprietor made in the process, and which will be mentioned presently, the disease was almost extirpated some years before the manufactory was given up.

Next in order, perhaps in the same class with colour-makers, are house-painters. The causes of their liability is the great quantity of the preparations of lead contained in the paints they use. It would appear that lead colic is most frequent among people of that trade in cities of the largest size. In Geneva, as I am informed by my friend Dr. C. Coindet of that place, colica pictonum is now almost unknown and never occurs among painters. In Edinburgh it is also little known among painters. A journeyman painter, a patient of mine in the Infirmary, had been seventeen years in the trade, and yet did not know what the painters' colic or lead palsy meant. In London, according to the Dispensary reports, and in Paris, according to the tables of Mérat, many workmen of that trade suffer. I have been informed by an intelligent workman, once a patient of mine, who had been a journeyman painter both in London and Edinburgh, that the number of his acquaintances who had been affected with colic in the metropolis was incomparably greater than here. This man ascribed the difference to the working hours being more in the former place, so that the men had not leisure enough to make it worth their while to clean themselves carefully in the intervals. This appears a rational explanation. I do not not know how the great prevalence of colic among painters in Paris is to be accounted for.

Plumbers, sheet-lead manufacturers, and lead-pipe makers, are also for obvious reasons apt to suffer; but as they are not necessarily exposed to the vapours of lead, and suffer only in consequence of handling it in the metallic form, it ought to be an easy matter to protect them. They themselves conceive that a very hazardous part of their occupation is the removing the melted lead from the melting pot, to make the sheets or pipes; but this operation cannot be dangerous if the melting pots are properly constructed.

A few cases of lead colic occur among glass-blowers, glaziers, and potters, who use the oxide of lead in their respective trades.

There are a few also among lapidaries and others, who use it for grinding and polishing, and among grocers and colourmen who sell its various preparations. Printers seldom suffer from the colic, but are generally thought liable to partial palsy of the hands, which is ascribed to frequent handling of the types. I have met with one case apparently of this nature.

Lead is not the only metal to which the power of inducing colica pictonum has been ascribed. Mérat has mentioned several instances