The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875-1920 : Uniting Local, National and Global Histories of Disease [1 ed.] 9780822981749, 9781848934467

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THE MAKING OF MODERN ANTHRAX, 1875–1920: UNITING LOCAL, NATIONAL AND GLOBAL HISTORIES OF DISEASE

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Series Editor: Bernard Lightman

Titles in this Series 1 Styles of Reasoning in the British Life Sciences: Shared Assumptions, 1820–1858 James Elwick 2 Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science Rebekah Higgitt 3 The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain Jessica Ratcliff 4 Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences Victoria Carroll 5 Typhoid in Uppingham: Analysis of a Victorian Town and School in Crisis, 1875–1877 Nigel Richardson 6 Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head L. S. Jacyna 7 Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Gender, 1880–1914 Graeme Gooday 8 James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age David Philip Miller 9 Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland Diarmid A. Finnegan 10 Communities of Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Juliana Adelman 11 Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England Simon Naylor 12 The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak Ian Hesketh

13 Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot’s Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887 Josep Simon 14 The British Arboretum: Trees, Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century Paul A. Elliott, Charles Watkins and Stephen Daniels 15 Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons Martin Willis 16 Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840–1910 Joe Kember, John Plunkett and Jill A. Sullivan (eds) 17 Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 1870–1910 Roger Smith 18 The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871 Efram Sera-Shriar 19 Brewing Science, Technology and Print, 1700–1880 James Sumner 20 Science and Societies in Frankfurt am Main Ayako Sakurai

Forthcoming Titles The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain, 1870–1914 Claire L. Jones Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800–1914 Ben Marsden, Hazel Hutchison and Ralph O’ Connor (eds) The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and his Contemporaries Bernard Lightman and Michael S. Reidy (eds) Astronomy in India, 1784–1876 Joydeep Sen

THE MAKING OF MODERN ANTHRAX, 1875–1920: UNITING LOCAL, NATIONAL AND GLOBAL HISTORIES OF DISEASE

by James F. Stark

Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper

Cataloging-in-Publication is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN

978-0-8229-8174-9 Hardback: 978-1-84893-446-7 0-8229-8174-2

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables

ix xi

Introduction 1 Bradford’s Illness: Local Investigations 2 Woolsorters’ Disease, Anthrax and Bradford Publics 3 Beyond Bradford: Anthrax across Britain 4 Compensating and Protecting: Anthrax and Legislation 5 Practices, Techniques, Therapies: Anthrax on the Continent 6 Global Connections: Turkey, Australasia and International Exchange Conclusion

1 17 41 63 91 117 145 175

Notes Works Cited Index

185 229 247

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I am tremendously grateful to Gregory Radick, Adrian Wilson and Monty Losowsky. Their encouragement, guidance, good humour and, above all, patience have made the process of completing the research which led to this book a real pleasure. I could not wish to have worked with a better team. Thanks are also due to Mark Harrison, Graeme Gooday and Bernard Lightman for their extremely constructive and helpful comments on producing the book, as well as to several referees who have offered insightful and sophisticated suggestions, all of which have helped to better frame the material which follows. It has been a privilege to work with Pickering & Chatto, and I am especially grateful to Ruth Ireland and Janka Romero for their dedication to the project. Ideas from across this book have been presented at institutions across the United Kingdom and beyond, and I thank everyone who has offered feedback on my work. Among these, I would like to particularly single out the community of postgraduate students and staff in the Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. Their contributions in seminars and informally have often yielded greater insight than two months of my own work, and it has been incredibly rewarding to work alongside them. I would like to thank the Thackray Medical Museum with whom I have worked closely over the last few years; it has been a delight to work in such a supportive environment. The opportunities offered by collaboration have been greatly appreciated, and I look forward to extending this relationship in the future. The project would not have been possible without the generosity of the Arts and Humanities Research Council to whom I am extremely grateful. Further financial support for trips to archives and conferences has been forthcoming from the University of Leeds, the British Society for the History of Science, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and the Wellcome Trust. There are many others who merit thanks – particularly a whole host of academics and musicians who have put up with years of my inane ramblings about anthrax – but at the risk of omission, I do not name them all here. – ix –

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The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

I concluded that it would be slightly strange and possibly a touch morbid to dedicate a book about a deadly disease to someone. I would nevertheless like to offer profound thanks to my mum for her invaluable support, belief and encouragement before, during and after the completion of this book. If I had felt able to dedicate a book about anthrax to anyone, it would have been her.

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure I.1: Three unidentified woolsorters working on a bale of Persian mohair, c. 1900; from F. Eurich, ‘The History of Anthrax in the Wool Industry of Bradford, and of its Control’, Lancet (1926) Figure 1.1: Details of the first twenty-three cases recorded by Bell in his notebook; from ‘Dr J. H. Bell, Notebook Concerning Anthrax Epidemic in Bradford’, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford Figure 2.1: ‘Death in the Woolpack: A Subject for a New Fresco in the Bradford Town Hall’; from the Yorkshireman (1878), Papers on Anthrax, University of Bradford Figure 3.1: Floor plan of Barrow’s Foreign Hide Liming Shop; from J. Spear, ‘On the Occurrence of Anthrax amongst Persons Engaged in the London Hide and Skin Trades’, in Twelfth Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1882–3: Supplement Containing the Report of the Medical Officer for 1882 (1883) Figure 4.1: Anthrax: Cautionary Notice; from the Papers of Dr Donald Hunter (1898–1977), Wellcome Library, London Figure 6.1: Advertisement for Pasteur’s anthrax vaccine; from A. Loir, Pasteur’s Vaccine of Anthrax in Australia: As a Preventive against Cumberland Disease in Sheep, Cattle, and Horses (1891) Table I.1: Years in which specific (largely local) terms for anthrax-like diseases first appeared in printed sources

– xi –

16

28

51

83 98

166 13

INTRODUCTION

The ravages made by the disease somewhat recently named ‘woolsorters’ disease’ in and around Bradford have during the past month or two attracted considerable attention, and although inquiries of a public character have been held as to the origin and effects of the disease, the number of victims has not in any way decreased.1

Just after noon on 22 July 1880, James Greenwood, a forty-nine-year-old woolsorter based in a factory around five miles west of Bradford, left his work early after complaining of a slight cold and ‘aching pains in his bones’. Greenwood went to bed when he returned home, but by the next morning his condition had worsened substantially. His anxious wife sent for a local medical practitioner, Dr Jackson, but by the time Jackson arrived to examine his patient at around ten o’clock in the morning, Greenwood was ‘in a state of collapse’.2 Shortly afterwards, and fewer than twenty-four hours after leaving his work, James Greenwood was pronounced dead, leaving behind his wife and seven children. Following his death, two other local doctors – John Henry Bell and John Spear – conducted a post-mortem examination of the body and declared that the cause of death was woolsorters’ disease. Spear took samples of blood and sent them to William Smith Greenfield of the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution in London for microscopic analysis. The Bradford coroner, Mr Hill, opened an inquest, and the resulting proceedings, with interest fuelled by the ire of Greenwood’s fellow workers, filled the columns of local newspapers. During the course of these investigations, local medical practitioners, public health officials and woolworkers all made suggestions for preventive measures that could be usefully employed in factories.3 Nineteenth-century Bradford was widely regarded as the ‘wool capital of the world’ (it was also referred to as ‘worstedopolis’ after the worsted yarns and fabrics characteristic of the town’s industry).4 A diverse range of animal fibres arrived in Bradford from across the globe in increasing quantities, placing it at the heart of an expanding network of international trade that encompassed South America, Australasia, India and the Ottoman Empire. The job held by Greenwood as a woolsorter was skilled labour, which demanded a lengthy apprenticeship. Frequently working in an enclosed, dusty and unpleasant atmos-

–1–

2

The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

phere, he and his fellow employees were responsible for opening tightly packed bales of wool, which arrived in the many factories of Bradford from elsewhere in Britain and abroad. They then classified the fleeces into different grades according to the quality of the wool, separating these out into open baskets. It was said that you could always identify a woolsorter from his handshake, as the lanolin in these rich, luxuriant fibres made the skin of their palms and fingers extremely smooth. Cases such as that of Greenwood were by no means uncommon in nineteenth-century Bradford, and he was but one of a number of employees in the town’s extensive wool trade who met such an end. The occurrence of rapid, sudden deaths in the workforce became known throughout West Yorkshire, and local employees coined the term ‘woolsorters’ disease’ to refer to such instances. Statistics for deaths from woolsorters’ disease are highly unreliable given that there was widespread disagreement among medical practitioners in West Yorkshire about the cause and diagnosis of the condition. Many initially thought that woolsorters’ disease was a chronic illness brought on by the accumulation of small particles of dust and hair in the lungs, while others denied the existence of woolsorters’ disease as an entity altogether. The view that cases of woolsorters’ disease shared a common cause with anthrax – the presence of Bacillus anthracis – was first publicized in the early 1880s, but practitioners did not accept this universally until later in the decade. During the 1880s Bradford experienced the largest number of cases of anthrax out of any local health authority in Britain. Even so, there were only thirty-one deaths from anthrax recorded by the Bradford Medical Officers of Health between 1877 and 1890.5 When compared with other infectious diseases such as cholera, typhoid and diphtheria, these numbers might appear relatively insignificant, but press coverage of the disease and medical interest was out of all proportion with its incidence; anthrax and woolsorters’ disease were major sources of anxiety for Bradfordians. This state of affairs persisted well into the twentieth century, when a combination of disinfection measures and general improvements in sanitation caused a gradual reduction in the number of cases. At the same time as the citizens, medical practitioners and public health officials of Bradford were wringing their hands about the problem of woolsorters’ disease in the late nineteenth century, on the other side of the world Australians were equally concerned, but for rather different reasons. Pastoralists had noticed what seemed to be a new disease among sheep and cattle in the 1850s. By the time that woolsorters’ disease occupied a central position in Bradford society in the late 1870s, Australians had named this animal disease after the administrative county in New South Wales where the illness was first observed: Cumberland. In parallel to these two, separate, diseases ran extensive international discourse about both woolsorters’ and Cumberland disease in local Bradford and Australian newspapers. There was significant exchange between these two places,

Introduction

3

especially when medical practitioners and interested lay parties began to realize that both woolsorters’ disease and Cumberland disease appeared to share Bacillus anthracis as a common cause. Professional medical channels of communication were not central to the exchange of materials, practices and knowledge related to anthrax; rather, correspondence about the wool trade, regular columns about the prices of raw wool and discussion of general agricultural and industrial practices in the lay press became the principal vehicles for fruitful debate about Cumberland disease, woolsorters’ disease and, later, anthrax. Many layers of sources, both primary and secondary, are available for Bradford, including rare documentation from the perspective of workers, and richly detailed newspaper reports. These enable The Making of Modern Anthrax to present a historical account of illness, where economic, cultural and social factors play central roles in the creation of different disease identities. As we will see throughout, the multiple anthraxes of this book, of which woolsorters’ disease and Cumberland disease were just two examples, were diseases of modernity in their numerous and increasing connections with industrialization, capitalization and globalism. The strong, international connections between Bradford and Australia, established around the common occurrence of anthrax-related diseases, were by no means unique in this period. Here we will explore the diverse ways in which France, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, India and the Ottoman Empire all had significant associations with anthrax. More than this, however, they were also intimately connected with Bradford in its capacity as both a world-leading centre of anthrax research and a town at the heart of the global wool trade. Intriguingly, by the turn of the 1920s there was far more universal international agreement about what anthrax was, what to call it, and some of the best methods to prevent it. Cumberland disease, woolsorters’ disease and various other earlier identities had become conflated in British public and medical discourse under the banner of anthrax, and the different properties of these illnesses had melded into one: that of anthrax as a single disease that had properties drawn from across its earlier identities. Bradford was central to this international discourse about anthrax, but it also led the way in terms of preventive measures, particularly in industry, bacteriological techniques and lay campaigning associated with the disease. The Making of Modern Anthrax therefore seeks to examine the relationship between woolsorters’ disease, anthrax, Bradford and the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Britain over the period in question, woolsorters’ disease and other forms of proto-anthrax gradually coalesced, and by 1920 they had been subsumed under the near-universal banner of anthrax. As the key hub of the global wool trade, Bradford was the melting pot for much of this transformation. Ideas about the different manifestations of anthrax were created, arrived and modified here, and the discourse surrounding anthrax and related diseases spilled from professional medical journals into local newspa-

4

The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

pers, public inquests and discussions in Bradford factories, and back again. This mirrored the transmission of the raw materials of the international wool trade, which were constantly implicated in different ways as the cause (or harbouring the cause) of anthrax. Further, the book will show the different ways in which the context of science, popular beliefs about disease, and a whole host of social groups and cultural factors – among them, the global wool trade, woolsorters, compensation, employers, families, ambitious physicians, anxieties, sheep – brought together a constellation of different diseases under the banner of anthrax. In this introductory section we shall first see how anthrax has hitherto been characterized by historians, before examining the questions that this book seeks to answer in relation to the wider historical literature. We will then look at how the overall structure of the book maps onto these questions, before finishing with two important matters of housekeeping: the issue of nomenclature for anthrax, and a brief introduction to the social, cultural and economic context of Bradford in the period of study. In seeking to examine the relationship between anthrax-related diseases in a diverse range of socio-political, economic and geographical contexts, this book also aims to offer a productive reconciliation between histories that are either explicitly local or global in their outlook. Therefore, while anthrax is our principal focus, the methodology of this study has far wider applicability for future histories of diseases and our knowledge about them.

Understanding Anthrax Anthrax has been widely characterized as the object of research by Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur and other medical scientists in the nineteenth century and as an agent of biological warfare in more recent times.6 Numerous historical accounts of the disease have stressed the key role of anthrax and its causative organism – Bacillus anthracis – in confirming the causal concept of disease in the late nineteenth century.7 Others have concentrated on the pioneering attempts to combat anthrax through both vaccination and other preventive measures in the decades around 1900.8 The anthrax attacks on the United States in September 2001 gave rise to a renewed interest in the disease, and recent scholarship has continued to emphasize the importance of anthrax in the rise of bacteriology during the late nineteenth century, while also examining its emergence as a biological weapon.9 Scholars have also argued that the major piece of British legislation associated with anthrax in this period, the Anthrax Prevention Act (1919), was largely ineffective in removing the disease from industries.10 Using the ‘knowledge in transit’ approach, historians have charted the movement of knowledge and research practices surrounding anthrax in the nineteenth century, particularly in the wool and horsehair industries. Specifically, Susan D. Jones and Philip M. Teigen argue that there was an international network of knowledge exchange

Introduction

5

between three keys areas of anthrax research: Walpole, in Massachusetts, and Glasgow and Bradford in Britain. This network was based on the exchange of specialist medical knowledge and a common appreciation for the distinctive visual properties of Bacillus anthracis.11 Many accounts of the history of anthrax include consideration of Bradford and the key researchers associated with the town, but thus far none have taken Bradford and West Yorkshire as the focal point of their study and situated it within a truly international context, even though all historians acknowledge the intimate links between Bradford’s wool industry and the emergence of anthrax as both a disease and a diagnostic category in the Western world.12 The historical and modern understandings of anthrax in an international context have attracted increasing attention from historians. Susan D. Jones’s biography of the disease, Death in a Small Package, tracks changes in understandings of anthrax from the ancient world through to the present day, but well over half of her account is dedicated to the twentieth century.13 Concentrating on Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, Jones employs a novel methodology by mobilizing modern studies of the global distribution of anthrax strains to show how the disease has been spread.14 Historians have only just begun to explore the emergence of anthrax in new localities such as South Africa and Australia; such studies have concentrated on specific geographical contexts and do not consider in any detail the relationships between anthrax in animals and in man, or comparative analysis of anthrax in different geographical settings.15 It can be argued that most of these studies suffer from having a focus that is either too broad or too narrow. Jones, for example, includes material across well over 10,000 years of history, and does not restrict her study to any one country or region. Her otherwise excellent account, while commendably broad in scope, consequently skates over important details in the history of anthrax in particular localities; Bradford, for example, receives just a few pages.16 At the other end of the scale, Gilfoyle, Collier and others engage with anthrax solely at the local or national level, and fail to appreciate the wider incidence of the disease as a global phenomenon.17 These narratives point to an inherent difficulty posed by examining anthrax in historical context: it had a very diverse range of identities as both a causative organism and a disease in different political, economic and social contexts. It is this problem that I will seek to unpack and address directly in the following chapters. Certain figures who feature prominently throughout the book, such as the Bradford medical practitioners John Henry Bell and Frederick William Eurich, are already established within the secondary literature. We shall also encounter a number of other individuals who are at present either peripheral to the narrative or absent from it, such as the Italian physician Achille Sclavo, the Australian public health official W. Perrin Norris and the New Zealand veterinary officer

6

The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

John Anderson Gilruth. A group particularly notable by their absence from the received view of anthrax and Bradford are the woolsorters of West Yorkshire, who were not only at risk of contracting the disease, but also key actors in shaping its very definition and informing the development of workplace regulations and legislation. Indeed, groups such as these, who acted as intermediaries between the medical profession and the lay public, have become increasingly prominent in the historical literature in recent years.18

Anthrax in Context The current literature on the history of anthrax thus leaves a number of open ends, especially, though not exclusively, with respect to Bradford. The Making of Modern Anthrax seeks to address three major questions in relation to anthrax and its associated diseases in this period. Firstly, what was the impact of the socalled Bacteriological Revolution on the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of anthrax? Secondly, how and why did the many locally defined, anthrax-like diseases that appeared in public and professional discourse during the nineteenth century coalesce into the seemingly unified understanding of anthrax that was crystallized in Britain by around 1920? And thirdly, to what extent and in what ways did geographical locations matter for this story? These questions can be usefully related to current historical understandings of bacteriology and sanitation, of disease identities, and of geographies of scientific and medical knowledge. The notion of a Bacteriological Revolution has recently been challenged by a number of historians. Michael Worboys, in particular, has argued that events normally seen as constituting this shift in fact took place over a much longer timescale than previously thought. For Worboys, the adoption of bacteriological understandings of disease and the associated practices was neither rapid nor complete.19 Instead, he argues that there existed multiple readings of ‘the’ germ theory of disease in Britain during this period, and that the implementation of germ-based practices in medicine and veterinary medicine was protracted and far from universal.20 Other historians have extended Worboys’s revisionist thesis to the practical application of germ theories in a number of cases, concentrating principally on medical practitioners, Medical Officers of Health and other professionals. Lay actors and other interested parties and publics – including key advocacy groups associated with germ theories of disease in Britain – have therefore been marginalized.21 Elsewhere, Christopher Hamlin’s work on public health has demonstrated that there was a conscious and deep-seated commitment to politically motivated sanitarian reform by medical practitioners, campaigners and legislators in the middle part of the nineteenth century, and that the emergence of bacteriological techniques and approaches created just as many new problems as they offered promising solutions to existing difficulties in

Introduction

7

both practice and theory.22 This book seeks to use the interpretive models posited by Worboys and Hamlin in order to examine what impact bacteriology had on attempts to combat woolsorters’ disease and anthrax. Of particular interest here are the roles of employers and employees in the wool trade, and in local and national organizations of both labour and capital; these will be examined alongside the more established narratives of medical professionals and public health officials in Britain and beyond. As we shall see throughout, anthrax-like diseases emerged in new locales across the world during the nineteenth century. These individual, locally bounded conditions acquired distinct cultural resonances depending on where they were found. They were therefore a product as much of prevailing social conditions as of biological and pathological processes. The historical nature of such disease concepts has been a source of major interest for historians in recent years. The work of Adrian Wilson can be used to support arguments that comparative study of disease terms can shed significant light on the social context surrounding each condition. Following on from Wilson, names assigned to diseases are far more significant than mere issues of nomenclature; the deconstruction of such terms is therefore key to understanding the social and cultural identity of diseases, as well as the attitudes and approaches of medical practitioners and other social groups to historical illnesses.23 More recently, Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys have examined the case of rabies in Britain. They conclude that the disease had a number of distinct identities that were dependent on social, cultural and biological context. For Pemberton and Worboys, rabies did not exist as a homogeneous entity; rather, it encompassed many different terms and forms, some of which bore little resemblance to each other.24 Building on this work, The Making of Modern Anthrax will therefore as a major goal examine the discrete identities of anthrax in social, cultural and geographic contexts, and map shifts in the understanding of these diseases and their associated practices. The diverse range of spaces – both geographical and social – occupied by anthrax and proto-anthrax conditions offers an excellent case study in this regard. To a large extent the diversity of anthrax across different social domains is explicable by its introduction into numerous new environments and locations during the period in question. The importance of a global perspective when looking at the exchange of scientific knowledge and practices has emerged as a cornerstone of historical enquiry; geographies of scientific and medical knowledge and practice are now central to the discipline. Among these, Charles Withers and David Livingstone in particular have demonstrated strong links between scientific enterprise and locality.25 Their recent collection, Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, confirms the interest in place for current histories of science, technology and medicine. The overarching argument running through the essays emphasizes that ‘science is a spatially distributed entity’; in

8

The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

recent years the humanities and social sciences in general terms have witnessed a ‘spatial turn’.26 The transmission of knowledge through national and international social structures and networks also forms a key element of what has come to be known as the ‘knowledge in transit’ approach. James Secord has argued that science itself is largely a form of communication, and he stresses that ‘the processes of movement, translation and transmission’ should be central to historical analysis.27 Historians of medicine have likewise noted the need to look upon medical theory and practice with an international perspective. Scholars such as Sujit Sivasundaram, Mark Harrison and David Edgerton have called for a global approach to historical narratives. Sivasundaram has argued that in studying narrow geographical areas, ‘something important has been lost’, while Harrison highlights the growth of international market-driven economies as a key consideration for the historian of medicine, particularly when considering infectious diseases; such themes underpin The Making of Modern Anthrax, although, as we shall see later, the book attempts to move beyond the local/global distinction.28 More recently still, Deborah Neill has noted the central role that international networks, conflicts and collaborations played in establishing tropical medicine as a discipline.29 The scope of local, national and international settings is thus an important emergent area of exploration for historians. This book examines the impact of the intellectual and practical dissemination of anthrax-like diseases in the specific, local setting of Bradford, before assessing the wider significance of this within both national and international contexts. We will see that anthrax provides a striking confirmation that locality mattered, not just for the purposes of historical enquiry but for historical actors themselves.

Overview A study of anthrax in Bradford alone would be instructive; however, the book is structured in order to show the international significance of Bradford’s relationship with anthrax, mirroring the importance of national and global perspectives for histories of science, technology and medicine. To this end, the six chapters are arranged in pairs, addressing anthrax in local, national and global contexts. All the chapters roughly cover the period from 1875, when Bradford’s medical practitioners – particularly John Henry Bell – began to take an increasing interest in woolsorters’ disease, through to 1920 and the immediate aftermath of the Anthrax Prevention Act (1919), which mandated disinfection for suspected imported materials. Although woolsorters’ disease was the subject of local discussion prior to the work of Bell, he was the first to connect the condition with anthrax, while the Anthrax Prevention Act was the culmination of over a decade of research by the Bradford-based Anthrax Investigation Board and a Home Office Departmental Committee of Inquiry.

Introduction

9

Chapter 1 introduces the major anthrax researchers in Bradford during this period: John Henry Bell and Frederick William Eurich. They did not work together in any substantive fashion; Eurich became involved in researching the disease fewer than twelve months before Bell died in 1906. The two also took very different approaches to determining possible preventive measures. Although he argued vociferously that Bacillus anthracis was the common cause of woolsorters’ disease and anthrax, Bell conducted the bulk of his research by charting the clinical progression of the disease and assessing factory conditions. Eurich was far more concerned with using laboratory techniques to classify different kinds of wool according to the risk that each posed. Chapter 2 moves beyond the professional medical domain to consider how non-medical publics in Bradford encountered woolsorters’ disease and anthrax through the local press. The chapter centres on two major local newspapers – the Bradford Observer and the Bradford Daily Telegraph – both of which played active parts in local debates surrounding the diseases. Medical professionals, employers, employees and public health officials, as well as politicians and labour organizations, used the columns of these publications to contest issues, including employer responsibility and the efficacy of various safety measures. Shifting to the national level, Chapter 3 uses experiences of the disease in Glasgow, Kidderminster and East Anglia to demonstrate similarities and differences with the Bradford case. Glasgow’s proactive and influential Medical Officer of Health, James Burn Russell, investigated several sudden deaths in one of the city’s largest horsehair factories in March 1878. He concluded that the disease was anthrax but did not initially relate these deaths to those in Bradford. The local press again played a major role in shaping the identity of anthrax in Glasgow, tapping into pre-existing local fears about the integrity of the food supply and the importation of live foreign animals. Kidderminster’s carpet industry, just like the wool trade in Bradford, was central to the local economy; it was in this trade that the majority of cases occurred. J. Lionel Stretton was a medical practitioner in the town who, in the 1890s and early 1900s, pioneered new surgical treatments for the external form of anthrax. One of the major differences identified between Bradford and Kidderminster is the lack of a highly organized labour force in the case of the latter. Active campaigning on the part of workers was thus not a prominent feature of the disease in the social context of Kidderminster, even though local newspapers such as the Kidderminster Shuttle provided a similar forum to the Bradford press. East Anglia was the major area of incidence for agricultural anthrax in Britain during this period. Cases of the disease were therefore seen primarily in farm labourers, who generally had to travel to London for specialist treatments. Parallels with Bradford were scarce in the literature of the period, suggesting that understandings of industrial anthrax were very different from its rural counterpart.

10

The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

Chapter 4 discusses the development of legislation designed to combat anthrax, as well as efforts to secure compensation for the families in fatal cases. Voluntary regulation agreed in Bradford during the 1880s through collaboration between capital, labour and medical professionals formed the basis for national-scale preventive measures, and Bradford-based employers and employees were highly successful in lobbying for the introduction of specific clauses, almost all of which reflected extant practices from the town. Debates about compensation did not concentrate on the biology of the disease but were rather concerned with whether the setting up of anthrax in a worker could be classified as an ‘accident’. Intriguingly, a compensation claim from the family of a deceased Kidderminster worker, not a Bradford case, was the first to successfully challenge an employer in this regard. Moving beyond Britain, Chapter 5 recalls the pioneering work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch on anthrax, before analysing the appropriation of these Continental approaches by Bradfordian and other British researchers and public health officials. The mass vaccination of animals on the Pasteurian model was swiftly ruled out by the majority of medical scientists in Britain (as well as Pasteur himself ) as the disease was not a significant enough problem among livestock. Rejection of this approach was also fuelled by the vociferous calls of the anti-vivisection movement. Therefore, although he was working with the anthrax bacillus, John Henry Bell based his approach to anthrax prevention and treatment on an understanding of the disease that did not require intimate knowledge of the organism’s habits and life cycle, in marked contrast to the necessity of a laboratory-based understanding of the disease on the part of both Pasteur and Koch. The final section of Chapter 5 gives the first thorough account of the role played by the Italian physician Achille Sclavo in anthrax treatment in Britain. He devised ‘Sclavo’s serum’, an anti-anthrax preparation, in the mid-1890s, and the noted Medical Inspector of Factories, Thomas Morison Legge, introduced this therapy to Bradford practitioners in 1904. Within a couple of years, Sclavo’s serum had become the trusted, standard treatment for cases of external and internal anthrax, both in Bradford and further afield. Finally, Chapter 6 looks beyond Europe and considers the impact of anthrax on Turkey, Australia and New Zealand in relation to Bradford. This chapter therefore places Bradford’s experiences with the disease in a truly global context, analysing how European anthrax expertise moved and emerged as preventive strategies that could be applied elsewhere. Similarly, we will see that Bradfordians took a keen interest in the practices associated with anthrax-like diseases in far-flung parts of the world. The majority of dangerous fleeces imported to Bradford originated in Turkey, particularly the Van region in the east of the country. Inhabitants of Bradford thus came to view that particular area as being primitive in its approach to sanitation: according to these accounts, anthrax was a disease that originated in that country owing to the poor hygiene practices of

Introduction

11

those living there. The chapter also charts the unsuccessful attempts of British legislators to establish disinfection stations in the countries from which suspect materials originated. European systems of anthrax control failed in Turkey for largely sociological reasons, but neither did extensive Turkish experiences of this disease – known locally as dallack – find a foothold in Britain. Rather, there existed a culturally determined impasse of knowledge exchange between these two contexts, where specialized dallack doctors, livestock raisers, merchants and fibre processers were regarded with suspicion and hostility by British and other European physicians. Looking further afield, the close trade relationship between Australia and Britain provided the context for significant exchange of information concerning anthrax prevention. Initially known in New South Wales as ‘Cumberland disease’, anthrax was not naturally endemic in Australia, but was most likely imported to the country via bone-based fertilizers from India. British lawmakers sought the advice of Australian veterinary practitioners – principally W. Perrin Norris – when determining the best strategies for preventing anthrax. New Zealand likewise experienced cases of the disease, but even there the condition was on occasion referred to as ‘Bradford’s disease’, showing just how pervasive and deeply engrained the association between the town and anthrax had become. Beyond the scope of anthrax, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how both knowledge and practices surrounding diseases were created, transformed and transmitted. Alongside the professional medical consideration of anthrax and related diseases, there ran a complex web of cultural and social frameworks where woolsorters, coroners, newspaper editors, pastoralists, merchants and factory owners discussed the nature of disease, preventive public health measures, issues of workmen’s compensation and the merits of different medical arguments. Combining these elements of local cultural life with geographical exchange both nationally and internationally yields a narrative that includes elements of both the cultural and spatial turns, highlighting the rich potential of pluralistic methodological approaches in histories of science, technology and medicine. At the outset, however, we need to consider two preliminary matters that, in very different ways, will help set the scene: the nomenclature of anthrax and proto-anthrax diseases, and the social and cultural setting of Bradford. There is a sense in which woolsorters’ disease, anthrax and the many other terms used to refer to similar diseases are analogous, but it is a mistake to suppose that a case of woolsorters’ disease that occurred in the 1860s can be equated with a case of anthrax from the 1910s at either the biological or social level. The following sections therefore establish the manner in which disease nomenclature will be treated throughout this study, before moving on to briefly discuss the economic and social background of Bradford.

12

The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

Naming Death Many historians have characterized woolsorters’ disease as an earlier form of anthrax, or even as simply another name for anthrax.30 On these readings, anthrax and woolsorters’ disease are biologically identical; the only change is one of nomenclature, driven by the research-based appropriation of the disease by medical scientists and practitioners from the 1880s. One of the principal arguments advanced by the current literature is that ‘[p]ainstaking bacteriological and epidemiological investigation transformed woolsorters’ disease into anthrax in 1881 in Bradford’.31 However, the properties of ‘woolsorters’ disease’ were themselves highly contingent and flexible prior to this date, and the name continued to be used in both the professional and public domains long after it had supposedly been equated with anthrax. Indeed, the transition from one to the other cannot be pinpointed to a particular moment, or even a specific year; Bradford newspapers continued to use ‘woolsorters’ disease’ until well after 1900. Prior to the winter of 1879, when John Henry Bell showed that Bacillus anthracis was present in a case of woolsorters’ disease and began to argue that anthrax and woolsorters’ disease had this as a common cause, the latter condition had little if anything to do with the presence of micro-organisms as far as Bradfordians were concerned.32 In fact, when the term ‘woolsorters’ disease’ first entered the lexicon during the mid-nineteenth century, medical practitioners generally considered that it was caused by a build-up of concretions of lime, dust and small hairs in the lungs over a long period of time.33 It is therefore misleading to consider woolsorters’ disease to be a form of anthrax, as this conflates historical definitions of these illnesses. In order to circumvent this problem of nomenclature (after all, we must call these diseases something), as far as is practical the terms will be used here as they were by the historical actors. When, for example, Bell began to use woolsorters’ disease and anthrax interchangeably from around 1880, they will be viewed as identical for him from that period onwards. However, prior to this they will be treated as two distinct conditions: a diagnosis of anthrax required the presence of B. anthracis, while earlier definitions of woolsorters’ disease did not. By the time that regulations were drawn up to combat woolsorters’ disease in 1884 (the so-called Bradford Rules), the two diseases were effectively overlapping for the Bradford public and medical profession.34

Introduction

13

Table I.1: Years in which specific (largely local) terms for anthrax-like diseases first appeared in printed sources. It is likely that terms such as these were used informally before achieving recognition in textual form: woolsorters’ disease is just one example of such a practice, as we will see in Chapter 2. The entries in bold indicate which terms were initially printed in local newspapers rather than in professional periodicals or books. Year 1398 1543 1855 1863 1865 1865 1868 1874 1874 1880 1883 1895 1898

Name Anthrax (Antrax) Malignant pustule Cumberland disease Splenic apoplexy Siberian fever Siberian plague Splenic fever Sorters’ disease Woolsorters’ disease Anthracaemia Bradford woolsorters’ disease Bradford disease Maladie de Bradford

Source De Proprietatibus Rerum, Britain The Most Excellent Workes of Chirurgerye, Britain Maitland Mercury, Australia Lancet, Britain Aberdeen Journal, Britain Lancet, Britain / John Bull, Britain Reports of the US Commissioner of Agriculture, USA A Few Observations on So-Called Sorters Disease, Britain Bradford Observer, Britain British Medical Journal, Britain Queenslander, Australia Marlborough Express, New Zealand Technique Microbiologique et Sérothérapique, France

Anthrax and its related diseases were known by a variety of names. Table I.1 shows the first identifiable dates in published materials when different terms for anthrax (broadly construed) came into use. There was a boom in the introduction and wider usage of such terms from the mid-nineteenth century, mirroring the emergence of anthrax-like diseases in new regions. This information also suggests that local newspapers such as the Bradford Observer were responsible for the popularization of such terms, at least to the same extent as professional medical publications like the Lancet and the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Of all of these terms, ‘woolsorters’ disease’ is perhaps the most significant for our purposes. This emerged from the Bradford workforce in the mid-nineteenth century before being appropriated by the medical community during the 1870s. Understanding the social and cultural milieu of Bradford in this period is therefore critical to unpacking the relationship between these interlinked diseases, and we move now to look at the circumstances of Bradford in the late nineteenth century in which these names and disease identities moved and interacted.

Bradford’s Social Setting The Bradford in which James Greenwood lived, worked and died was possessed of a lively social and cultural life. Like many provincial manufacturing centres in nineteenth-century Britain, the town experienced significant population expansion, played host to a politically motivated local press and, at least for a time, provided great wealth generation for entrepreneurs. The two major newspapers, the Bradford Observer and the Bradford Daily Telegraph, had contrasting agendas and demonstrated the breadth of political views in the town. Both were liberal, but the Telegraph was a paper of radical leanings, while the Observer preached

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The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

a more moderate liberalism. A Conservative rival, the Bradford Chronicle, appeared in the early 1870s on the back of Bradford’s ‘Tory revival’ during the 1860s, but it lasted only eleven years before folding.35 The local medical community was also an active one. During the nineteenth century Bradford acquired an Infirmary and a well-supported Medico-Chirurgical Society (founded in 1863) as well as two rather more unusual and specialized institutions: the Royal Eye and Ear Hospital (1857) and a dedicated Microscopical Society (1882).36 The neighbouring Leeds Medical College (from 1831) provided university-style training, offering an alternative to the more traditional provincial routes into medicine through apprenticeships and training in such established centres as London, Oxbridge and Edinburgh. Further, Bradford was the cradle of the Independent Labour Party during the late 1880s and early 1890s, and both its manufacturers and trade unionists contributed significantly to national organizations of capital and labour respectively. In recognition of the innovative nature of Bradford in this period, the Bradford Observer noted in 1896 that the town’s residents were ‘used to Bradford leading the way’.37 Bradford’s position as the major wool-processing centre in the world is also a critical component of this story. Bradford-based manufacturers imported raw materials from across the globe; these arrived almost exclusively in Liverpool and were transported to the town, where the grounds for an expanded, largely mechanized wool-based industry had been laid by the end of the eighteenth century.38 Driven by a conscious decision on the part of industrialists to specialize in woollens and worsteds, West Yorkshire quickly surpassed the traditional wool heartlands of Norfolk and the West Midlands, for whom these items were just one of a number of industrial products.39 Such was the dominance of Bradford during this period that one of the principal methods for preparing wool became known as the Bradford system.40 Numerous historians have acknowledged the central role played by West Yorkshire in the global wool trade.41 While Bradford was a key location within the international economic network of wool and wool-derived products, the raw fleeces that were brought into the Bradford region were likewise central to the town’s local economy. The pre-eminence of wool within Bradford was legendary: the British press commonly referred to the town of Lawrence in Massachusetts as ‘the Bradford of America’ for its booming textile industry during the nineteenth century.42 Although Bradford itself was the byword for the global wool trade, associated satellite towns – Halifax, Huddersfield, Bingley, Shipley and Saltaire – had many factories of their own, and expanded the ‘Bradford trade’ across much of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Mohair, taken from the Angora goat, and alpaca were used to make suits and other luxurious items of clothing in West Yorkshire; these products were widely regarded as being the best examples of their kind. In order to keep up with the demand for these products both at home and abroad,

Introduction

15

Bradford manufacturers increasingly looked to foreign imports for newer, more cost-effective wools.43 It was during the mid-nineteenth century when West Yorkshire manufacturers like Titus Salt, Sr introduced alpaca and mohair, originating from places such as Peru, India and the Ottoman Empire. Thereafter, local workers in the industry began to notice a peculiar and (seemingly) new disease among those involved in the early stages of processing these raw materials: this was known locally and, later, further afield as woolsorters’ disease. Most of the processes involved in preparing a raw fleece for weaving were entirely mechanized by 1850. There was, however, one notable exception: the task of sorting the wool by quality was still carried out by hand, and in fact remains so today. These woolsorters were responsible for opening the bales of tightly packed wool, which were bound with metal hoops, removing the fleeces, shaking out any residual dust and then separating the pieces of wool according to the needs of the particular items being manufactured: from fine suits and other items of clothing to blankets. Figure I.1 shows three woolsorters at work, one in the foreground cutting the iron hoops binding fleeces together, while his two colleagues identify the qualities of wool present in a different bale. Woolsorting therefore required – in the words of an expert of the time, writing in 1869 – ‘a person of long experience, and sound, steady judgement, to value [a piece of wool] by the fineness, soundness, softness, density, uniformity, and whiteness of its fibres’.44 It was a skilled occupation, with an apprenticeship lasting at least two years, and sorters were far better paid than the combers and machine-minders who were responsible simply for the correct functioning of mechanical processes further along the production line.45 According to a Local Government Board Medical Officer, John Spear, in 1880 2.9 per cent of the adult male population in Bradford and Keighley were employed as woolsorters, constituting over three-quarters of the total number of sorters in England.46 Such was the concentration of woolsorters in Bradford during the nineteenth century that the National Union of Woolsorters (NUW), formed in 1889, was based in the town.47 The NUW was highly active politically, and they campaigned vigorously to make sure that their members were able to find sufficient work. By 1910 the NUW’s membership stood at 1,826; even the far more niche Bradford Wool Top and Noil Warehousemen’s Union boasted 900 members, while a splinter union – the Bradford Woolsorters’ Society – had a further 312 members.48 Nevertheless, for the large numbers of woolsorters in and around Bradford in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, steady employment was by no means guaranteed. In addition, from the 1880s onwards more parttime workers were taken on, with squeezed manufacturers demanding that fewer employees achieve increased productivity.49

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The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

Figure I.1: Three unidentified woolsorters working on a bale of Persian mohair, c. 1900. Underneath the sorting table can be seen a broad funnel. This housed a fan designed to draw the dust away from the sorters, which was the subject of much debate among those drafting safety regulations (see Chapter 4). The sorters’ garments were known as ‘brats’. Image reproduced from F. Eurich, ‘The History of Anthrax in the Wool Industry of Bradford, and of its Control’, Lancet, 9 January 1926, pp. 107–10, on p. 107; with permission from Elsevier.

Woolsorters’ disease was therefore a significant concern to those employed in the industry as well as their families and other dependents. It is therefore natural to examine its occurrence in the setting of Bradford, particularly given the socio-political composition of the town, with its widely read local newspapers, its active medical community and institutions, and its major role in the emergent labour movement from the early 1890s. We will ultimately see just how far the relationship between Bradford and anthrax travelled, but we begin in the town itself, where some of the principal British anthrax experts carried out their research. The first chapter focuses on the approaches of two of these: John Henry Bell and Frederick William Eurich.

1 BRADFORD’S ILLNESS: LOCAL INVESTIGATIONS

The research into woolsorters’ disease and anthrax in Bradford between 1875 and 1920 was marked by the contributions of two particularly noteworthy medical practitioners: John Henry Bell and Frederick William Eurich. Bell was the first to demonstrate that the mysterious woolsorters’ disease in humans was caused by the same organism as anthrax or splenic fever in animals, while Eurich was responsible for classifying different types of wool and hair according to the risk that each posed to health, as well as determining through laboratory-based research which substances might act as suitable disinfectants. The measure of the importance of their work comes from the recognition afforded to them by the wool and textile industries during their lifetimes. Bell received a gold watch from several woolsorting firms in 1881 ‘as a token of the regard in which he was held by those whose cause he had so nobly maintained’ – this after he had been investigating the condition for less than three years. His obituary in the BMJ also noted that ‘[t]he number of lives saved through Dr. Bell’s instrumentality has probably been far greater than those lost in fighting many of the great battles of history’.1 For his part, Eurich’s retirement in 1937 saw him presented with the Textile Institute’s gold medal – the first man from outside of the trade to be thus recognized.2 At a dinner held in Eurich’s honour on 29 September of that year, he was also presented with a large cheque by the president of the Bradford Chamber of Commerce as a token of appreciation for his work on anthrax.3 The centenary of Eurich’s birth was also commemorated when a bench was presented to the Textile Archive of the Bradford College bearing the inscription: ‘Dr F. W. Eurich (1867–1945) “He Conquered Anthrax”’. The work of these two figures has often been conflated in the secondary literature: Eurich’s investigations of the early twentieth century are generally regarded as the natural continuation of those of Bell. Collier, for example, asserts that ‘Bell passed away and left the continuation of his work to Frederick W. Eurich’, while Swiderski has also argued that, following on from the work of Bell, ‘[t]he task of identifying this source of infection was taken up by the next generation of Bradford physicians, specifically by Fritz W. Eurich’.4 Margaret Bligh’s – 17 –

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The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

biography of Eurich weaves in details of Bell’s contribution; however, there is a strong implication, particularly in the chapter entitled ‘Anthrax – Triumphant Conclusion’, that Eurich was the successor to the initial research programme carried out by Bell. In this respect, one is seen as carrying forward the work of the other.5 Much of this secondary literature largely considers the work of Bell and Eurich in isolation – a position that ignores the different institutional, social and medical settings within which these two figures were working. The backdrop against which their research into disease in the wool industry was carried out has often been termed the ‘Bacteriological Revolution’. Such a notion has in recent years been challenged by historians of medicine. While acknowledging the changes that took place in late nineteenth-century Britain as a result of the development of new experimental techniques and forms of knowledge, for example, Michael Worboys’s revisionist thesis asserts that these shifts were protracted and incomplete; a plurality of disease understandings existed during this period.6 His analysis opens a niche in the historiography within which this chapter will be located. It is argued here that there were clearly localizable differences in approaches to disease, in terms of the role of both germs and the associated discipline of bacteriology, in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain. This chapter will therefore focus on the practical research strategies that were seen in Bradford, as opposed to the more conceptual germ theories themselves. To explain the marked differences between the approaches of Bell and Eurich, we will look at the institutional settings within which they carried out their respective research. This departs from the received view of these two individuals: that they were figures who took roles independent of others in a continuous, locally organized research programme. In contrast, this chapter argues that they did not simply act alone. That is not to say, of course, that the importance of Bell and Eurich to the work carried out in Bradford will be overlooked. The focus will instead be placed on the organizations that provided a framework for their research and, more importantly, the diseases that were the subject of their work. For Bell, the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society was the main forum within which he delivered his findings, took on board the views of his colleagues, and attempted to encourage support for his argument that woolsorters’ disease and anthrax shared a common cause. He was also an active and driving member of the Commission on Woolsorters’ Diseases, established in 1880 by the Medico-Chirurgical Society in direct response to his own research findings. In contrast, Eurich worked under the auspices of both the Anthrax Investigation Board for Bradford and District (AIB) and, from 1913, the Home Office Departmental Committee of Inquiry (DCI), although the latter will be analysed in more detail in Chapter 4. These two contrasting modes of research – Bell’s

Bradford’s Illness

19

work as an interested practitioner and Eurich’s as a salaried member of the AIB – led to different methods of investigating woolsorters’ disease and anthrax. Most significantly for our purposes, however, is the fact that Bell and Eurich were in effect researching very different diseases. The object of Bell’s study was woolsorters’ disease. This was a locally bound disease with a disputed cause, duration and even existence: was it bacteriological or environmental, chronic or acute, a new illness or simply different manifestations of well-known diseases? It carried a whole raft of social and cultural assumptions, most particularly about those individuals who were at the greatest risk: the woolsorters themselves. Eurich, however, was interested in anthrax, a disease that had an established bacteriological cause, a global reach and a burgeoning importance in medico-legal circles as a compensable industrial illness. These different diseases, which were largely culturally determined, had a profound impact on the research approaches of Bell and Eurich and the organizations within which they worked. We move first to examine the research context of Bell, outlining his medical background and the institutional setting in which his work took place. Bell initially failed to convince many of his fellow practitioners and engaged in spirited debates within the medical press, in particular with Edward Tibbits, who was a vociferous critic of Bell’s claims about woolsorters’ disease. Eurich began to research anthrax less than a year before Bell died, and the second major section of this chapter will show that his research was profoundly influenced by the principal organization for which he worked – the AIB. This chapter therefore seeks to locate the contrasting research strategies of Bell and Eurich within a local, institutional framework. Later in the book we shall see that while their research was at first glance Bradford-centric, their work achieved global recognition.

John Henry Bell (1832–1906) [O]ne of the greatest benefactors that the working man of Bradford has ever had.7

John Henry Bell was born in Bradford in the early 1830s to Scottish parents; his father, William Bell, was a merchant in the city. Owing to ill health during his childhood, John Henry was raised in Scotland by his uncle, where he ‘had a sound education, a strict religious upbringing, the fresh country air, and simple country food’.8 He returned to Bradford in time to complete his schooling in Rawdon, just north of the town. At the age of fourteen, he undertook an apprenticeship with the surgeon Mr Corrie, with whom he would remain for some six years.9 In 1852 Bell moved to become an assistant to Dr Milnthorpe in Ripon, before seeking an opportunity to start formally on the professional ladder. To this end he became an assistant to a lecturer at the Leeds Medical College, Dr Braithwaite, and there he was able to attend the classes himself. Dur-

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The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

ing this time Bell made a significant contribution to Braithwaite’s research, this being acknowledged in the latter’s hugely influential medical text, The Retrospect of Practical Medicine and Surgery.10 In 1857, after two years of study at the college, Bell was successful in the examinations at the Royal College of Surgeons.11 Bell initially applied for a job as a house surgeon at the Bradford Royal Infirmary, but being unsuccessful, he set up his own practice between Westgate and Lumb Lane in the centre of Bradford. Shortly afterwards Bell obtained a position as junior medical officer at the newly established Bradford Eye and Ear Hospital, founded by Dr Edward Bronner.12 Bell became a skilled ophthalmic surgeon, and one of his most significant contributions to this field was to give the first description, in 1874, of the industrial illness miners’ nystagmus.13 This he presented as a paper to the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society, of which he was a founding member in 1863. He initially rose to prominence in connection with Bradford’s famous ‘poisoned lozenges’ incident of 1858, where, through a pharmacist’s error, humbugs destined for Bradford market were made using arsenic in place of the more usual sugar. Bell’s practice was centrally located, and as the offending sweets had been sold nearby, he attended many who fell ill. In investigations that followed, Bell correctly identified arsenic as the cause of the poisoning; other practitioners thought that cholera or some other infectious disease was to blame.14 Bell maintained broad professional interests, ranging from industrial conditions, such as nystagmus and woolsorters’ disease, through to obstetrics and gynaecolog.15

Woolsorters’ Disease Bell’s interest in woolsorters’ disease became concretized in 1877 when he saw a suspected case in Bradford in a regular patient who died ‘within seventeen hours from the apparent commencement of his illness’.16 On 5 February the following year, having sought out details of other cases, he delivered a paper to the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society. Here, Bell offered some possible explanations for the sudden deaths of woolsorters who had, for the most part, previously enjoyed good health. At this stage, as he admitted to other members of the Society, he had not conducted any experimental investigations into the matter. Instead, he based his selection of the most likely theory on clinical observations, knowledge of working conditions and evidence from the sorters themselves. The explanation that Bell favoured was ‘that the disease is Septicaemia due to the inhalation of a septic poison, produced by decomposition of animal matter in damaged bales’.17 His primary reasons for concluding thus were influenced by the analogous progression of other infectious diseases, such as smallpox and scarlatina (scarlet fever). In answer to a question from Edward Bronner, Bell’s colleague at the Royal Eye and Ear Hospital, Bell confirmed that he had not analysed the blood of sorters microscopically. Given that he was attributing the disease to an

Bradford’s Illness

21

unobservable septic poison, however, Bell had no particular reason to peer down a microscope; he did not expect that such an investigation would yield any new information of value or relevance. Also important were the preventative measures that Bell recommended. Samuel Lodge, Sr, another Bradford medical practitioner, had noted in 1855 that there had occurred ‘[s]everal sudden deaths … among the mohair sorters engaged at the mill of Messers Foster, Queenshead’. Lodge, Sr suggested that sorters should either wear respirators or grow long moustaches that would filter out the dust and small hairs present in the sorting-room.18 These recommendations were based on the understanding, prevalent during the 1850s, that the disease was a chronic condition arising from the inhalation of hair, dust and other particles over a lengthy period of employment. Bell, by contrast, was seemingly the first to advocate disinfection of the fleeces: Prevention: – Dr Bell said that this might be secured by greater care being expended in packing to keep out suspicious fleeces, or to disinfect them … The bales on being opened out ought to be exposed for 24 hours to air[,] heat, or other disinfecting agents.19

There are two points worthy of note in these claims. Firstly, Bell suggested that there might be a distinct group or set of fleeces to which the term ‘suspicious’ might be applied, despite the fact that he did not indicate what particular features of a fleece might render it suspicious. Secondly, he used the idea of a ‘disinfecting agent’ in non-specific terms, covering both air and heat, but not referring to specific chemical disinfectants. This is highlighted by the fact that, when questioned by another member of the Society, Mr Thomas, as to whether ‘the suggestion for disinfecting the wool had been carried out and with what result’, Bell responded that ‘at Fosters Mill … [t]he wool was washed, but it clogged, increased the work and the men gave it up’.20 There is nothing to suggest that this washing was carried out using anything other than water, indicating Bell’s belief that this would be sufficient to render the fleeces innocuous, and highlighting his broad use of the term ‘disinfection’. At the meeting of the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society, several other members put forward suggestions for the cause of woolsorters’ disease. Dr Rabagliati asserted that the concretions found in the lungs in some cases suggested that the substance (or substances) responsible for death ‘could only be gathered by degrees’, marking woolsorters’ disease out as a chronic condition. Dr Meade argued that while woolsorters’ disease was an acute disease, the poison cited by Bell acted ‘suddenly on the nervous system’. Mr Aston stated that ‘germs should be eliminated from the enquiry [as] they were not adequate to the production of such sudden effects’. Bell’s attempts to elucidate the mechanism by which sorters became ill were met with approval, even if they disagreed with his actual claims, proposing instead a variety of other possible causes and ruling out a role

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The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

for germs in the process. The Society’s president, Dr Meade, encouraged other members to record and report on any further suspected cases. He agreed with Bell’s idea that the disease was a form of blood poisoning, but suggested that ‘[t] he subject was not exhausted [and] there was room for further inquiry’.21 Almost exactly two years later, Bell had changed his position. This was not through a flash of genius or sudden inspiration, but was rather stimulated by a casual remark from a colleague. Bell’s initial association of woolsorters’ disease with anthrax ‘was the outcome of a suggestion thrown out by his friend Dr [ John] Eddison, of Leeds, then fresh from the bacteriological laboratories of the Continent’, a suggestion that Bell heard at a meeting of the neighbouring Leeds and West Riding Medico-Chirurgical Society shortly after his own paper in February 1878.22 Eddison was certainly aware of the work of Robert Koch, who had argued that there was a causal link between the presence of Bacillus anthracis and the occurrence of splenic fever in grazing animals. In addition, Koch had identified B. anthracis as being the causative agent in the case of malignant pustule – a form of external anthrax – in humans.23 Eddison thus suggested that Bell examine the blood of cases of suspected woolsorters’ disease for the presence of B. anthracis. Bell was therefore made acutely aware of the exact agent for which he was searching in order to confirm his colleague’s suspicion that there was a potential connection between woolsorters’ disease, malignant pustule and splenic fever. He subsequently enlisted the help of other medical acquaintances to assist him in a series of inoculation experiments at premises in Leeds in order to test this theory. Departing from his earlier rejection of microscopy, Bell’s method involved injecting blood taken from suspected cases of woolsorters’ disease in humans, into rabbits and other laboratory subjects. At post-mortem, he conducted both macro- and microscopic analysis of the organs and blood – a practice that remained controversial and yet which was becoming increasingly prevalent in this period.24 In doing so, he made two significant observations: firstly, that the spleens of his test animals were greatly enlarged (a classic sign of splenic fever), and secondly, that the blood contained a very large number of minute organisms, identified by Bell as B. anthracis. Within a year and a half, by the winter of 1879, Bell had satisfied himself that B. anthracis was indeed the causative agent responsible for woolsorters’ disease, and he returned to give a second paper to the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society on 3 February 1880. Bell presented his revised explanation for the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease, and four other members also detailed cases that they had observed. The paper attracted an unusually high number of both participants and discussants: thirty-five medical practitioners attended the meeting (the next highest attendance for the 1879–80 session was nineteen). Bell’s position was unequivocal:

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23

[A]fter new investigation he had come to the conclusion that the poison of woolsorters disease was the same as that inducing splenic fever, and anthrax, or malignant pustule, in animals, and that the infective agent was a Bacterium called the Bacillus Anthrax [sic].25

Bell acknowledged that this differed markedly from his earlier efforts to explain the observed symptoms, and that ‘[h]e now held the opinion above’ as being the definitive mechanism by which woolsorters’ disease was induced in the human subject. Although Bell felt confident enough to conclude that it was B. anthracis that was the causative agent in the case of woolsorters’ disease, a question posed by the president of the Society elicited a surprising admission. When asked ‘whether the Bacillus anthracis had been found in the Blood of the Patients’, Bell responded that ‘he had not found the Bacillus Anthracis in the human subject, he had in the case of animals. The investigation had yet to proceed further’.26 Another indication of the seeming haste with which Bell moved to his conclusion came from the manner in which he diagnosed suspected cases of woolsorters’ disease. When questioned as to why one particular incidence of disease presented by a colleague, David Goyder, should be considered as being woolsorters’ disease, Bell responded that it ‘was proved to be woolsorters’ disease because three other men died within a month who sorted in the same room, separately they might not be considered so, but here was a batch which proved it’.27 He did not comment on the presence or otherwise of B. anthracis in these cases. These responses provide an important insight into the way in which Bell went about investigating woolsorters’ disease and determining which cases were indeed due to this illness. He did not consider the observation and identification of specific bacilli necessary in the deceased (or through inoculation using fluids taken post-mortem) to declare that the case was one of woolsorters’ disease. Rather, he regarded the environment in which the suspected case occurred and the accompanying clinical symptoms (which in any case were usually minimal and therefore frequently overlooked) to be sufficient reason for giving a definitive diagnosis of woolsorters’ disease. The presence of suspicious wools and the macroscopic pathological progression were therefore still key indicators of woolsorters’ disease, despite Bell’s confidence in a bacteriological cause.

The Commission on Woolsorters’ Diseases As a result of the reservations expressed by other members of the Society, R. H. Meade – consulting surgeon to the Bradford Royal Infirmary and Fever Hospital, and one who believed that the cause of woolsorters’ disease was still unknown – suggested that a ‘commission of members for [sic] the Society in whom confidence could be placed should investigate it’.28 Following unanimous support among members for this suggestion, a dozen practitioners formed the Commission on Woolsorters’ Diseases in the autumn of 1880, ‘with a view to

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The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920

the discovery of the nature of the infective poison and for the suggestion of the remedies best calculated to combat and prevent the disease’.29 By the following summer, the Commission had met eighteen times but remained divided as to the cause of the illness, even though all acknowledged some ‘virulent infective agent’ was implicated.30 Members made detailed notes of all the experiments and other activities in which the Commission was engaged; several were often present at autopsies of suspected cases. After the death of John Grint, for example, ‘Drs. Mackenzie, Bell, Appleyard, and Goyder … made a post-mortem examination of the body of the deceased’.31 Goyder’s accompanying notes show that he and others carried out a meticulous investigation and found that the spleen was ‘twice the normal size and very firm’. In addition, ‘[p]ortions of lung, liver, spleen, kidneys and bronchial fluids were taken away, and tubes of blood from the heart, peritoneal fluid, pericardial fluid &c., for examination and experiment’.32 In the first year of the Commission, microscopical investigation formed a significant part of their enquiry, and members recorded the results of these observations. Significantly, Dr Goyder saw fit to analyse the ‘tissues of healthy mice’ in May 1881 in order to ascertain whether bacilli were present. Goyder and others clearly remained to be convinced that bacilli were necessarily indicators of disease. After ‘about 30 meetings’ the Commission failed to reach agreement about the nature of woolsorters’ disease. In their final report, the members stated that: Messrs. and Drs. Butterfield, Bell, Rabagliati, Roberts, and Goyder, were of the opinion that the affection was internal anthrax or splenic fever, and that the cases of malignant pustule were external anthrax; and that the Materies Morbi of both, was the Bacillus Anthracis … Messers. and Drs. Burnie, Appleyard, Britton, Meade, and Ellis, were also of opinion that woolsorter’s disease was internal anthrax or a form of splenic fever … but they were undecided whether the Bacillus Anthracis was the Materies Morbi of the affections, or not.33

The most telling conclusion, however, was that the Commission was ‘convinced that much further investigation, especially into cases among men, is required before the work can be said to be complete’.34 The two-year investigation therefore failed to produce anything approaching a consensus among the members of the Commission about the bacteriological cause of woolsorters’ disease, anthrax or splenic fever. Meanwhile, in a paper published in the BMJ in 1880, Bell presented the details of several cases of anthrax and anthracaemia; the former constituted the external form of the disease, where a pustule is exhibited, the latter the internal form, which displayed fewer specific symptoms. Bell noted that cutaneous anthrax had ‘not previously been associated with “woolsorters’ disease”; it is, however, the local or external form of this disease’.35 In making this claim, he was exposing himself to the same criticisms levelled at his paper delivered in Bradford earlier that year. The cases that were put forward showed two of cutaneous

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anthrax and two of suspected woolsorters’ disease. Bell described the latter as being ‘produced by the same material as anthrax’.36 Another important conclusion that Bell drew at this point was that the spores of B. anthracis were ‘derived from the fleeces of animals which have died from this disease’.37 This was to prove a pivotal claim in years to come, and medical practitioners continually suggested that so-called ‘fallen’ fleeces, taken from animals that had already died, posed an especially great risk to health. It was not until a more detailed bacteriological investigation was conducted in the early twentieth century that this notion would (or indeed could) be subjected to more detailed research.

‘Medical Fashions’ There were ‘deep divisions’ within the Commission on Woolsorters’ Diseases, and Edward T. Tibbits (1839–85) was the most prominent of Bell’s critics. He disagreed in particular with the bacterial explanation for the disease, and the two exchanged views within both the medical and popular periodical press.38 This section will explore in greater depth the differences between their contrasting explanations for the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease. A colleague of Bell’s at the Bradford Royal Infirmary, Tibbits provided spirited opposition to ideas concerning a specific bacterial cause for woolsorters’ disease (and infectious diseases in general). Trained at University College London and later at the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital, Dublin, Tibbits was one of a not-insignificant number of British medical practitioners who questioned the bacterio-centric explanation for the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease during the 1870s and 1880s.39 On 11 June 1881 Bell published a paper in the BMJ linking the condition with employees working at different stages of wool preparation, and he argued that various classes of wool were particularly responsible for inducing the disease. He detailed several cases that he had encountered, and also confirmed that he had begun to actively search for bacilli in samples: on one occasion ‘[s]erum from vesicles [around the cutaneous lesion] contained a few bacilli’, while in another ‘[s]erum from the arm contained bacilli’.40 Bell’s sphere of medical interest had therefore expanded from the solely environmental to include micro-organisms invisible to the naked eye. In the same issue of the BMJ as Bell’s article, Samuel Lodge, Jr, another Bradford practitioner, also wrote on the subject of woolsorters’ disease, and the journal included a comparatively lengthy editorial commenting on these two pieces. Lodge, Jr focused on the apparent resilience of the causative agent (although he did not explicitly refer to Bacillus anthracis, only to ‘a few rods, i.e., bacilli’), while the editorial piece advised that excluding dangerous fleeces would be a more reliable method for combating the disease than attempting to find a cure for cases in which woolsorters’ disease was already established.41

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After reading these articles, Tibbits replied in print a week later, on 18 June 1881, with a direct challenge to the claims of Bell and Lodge, Jr. He disputed the diagnoses of woolsorters’ disease offered by both authors, and argued instead that cases which had been attributed to this illness were in fact due to other conditions, chief among which was bronchial pneumonia. Tibbits directed attention away from the identification of bacilli as being the most important element in a confident diagnosis. He instead focused on the age of patients, the presence of other underlying conditions and the fact that other workmen working on the same material had escaped illness. He also argued that: No one at present can tell us any definite characters which entitle the bacillus to the specific name of ‘anthracis’. In the absence of such characters, surely the name cannot be correct, and should not, therefore, be employed.42

Tibbits was not simply contesting the nomenclature of the bacillus to which Bell and Lodge, Jr attributed the cause of woolsorters’ disease; in fact, he was stating that this particular bacillus had no distinguishing features that rendered it capable of being a disease-causing agent, nor differentiated it from other bacilli (which Tibbits considered to be universally harmless). Indeed Bell, save for noting in his paper that the bacilli in question were ‘non-motile’, did not provide any other characteristics that might indicate with any degree of certainty that these organisms were identifiable as B. anthracis. Bell delayed his response for a fortnight, but produced a devastating critique of Tibbits’s position, in terms of both the ‘tone and temper of the letter’ and the scientific and medical merit of the views expressed. Referring to Tibbits’s own, alternative explanation for the disease – ‘congestion or inflammation of lung or lungs’ – Bell ‘need scarcely say that such an opinion, which was not satisfactory to the profession and the public forty years ago, is not likely to be more so now’.43 Bell saw fit to brand Tibbits’s views as ‘altogether out of date, and of no scientific value’.44 This debate continued in the BMJ as both Tibbits and Bell submitted further letters until the journal brought an enforced end to the epistolary exchange on 23 July. In what was to be his final contribution to this, Bell highlighted that Tibbits was employing ‘scraps of opinions which are out of date’.45 Not to be outdone, Tibbits took these disagreements into the public domain. He wrote to the Times, repeated his earlier critiques of Bell, and challenged luminaries within the biomedical sciences, including Louis Pasteur, William Smith Greenfield and Ernst Klebs, to demonstrate that cases of woolsorters’ disease were due to something more than valvular disease of the heart.46 This particular conflict, and the wider dispute between Bell and Tibbits, had important consequences for the medical understanding of the nature and cause of woolsorters’ disease, as well as raising more practical concerns. For example, the report of the Commission on Woolsorters’ Diseases, which appeared in the following year (1882), did not pre-

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sent a united and well-organized conception of the illness, but rather revealed inherent disagreements between the members as to the aetiology, potential treatments and prevention of the condition. In addition, the report was circulated only among the members of the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society; the title page of the text bears the marking: ‘Printed for Private Circulation only’.47 The research carried out by Bell and others in compiling the report was thus not made publicly available or even sent to interested employers. For Tibbits’s part, his opposition to the germ theory of disease in general terms was confirmed in 1884 when he published his text, Medical Fashions in the Nineteenth Century. This book argued that the reliance on germs and bacteria as the causative agents of disease was simply a ‘fashionable’ explanation. ‘Bacterio-mania’ pervaded all medical thought, and its popularity, coupled with the simultaneously worrying and exciting notion that specific, miniature organisms were associated with characteristic illnesses, had, the author contended, an adverse effect on the quality of both research and care within the medical profession.48 Despite the lack of agreement among members of the Commission, as well as his conflict with Tibbits, Bell’s own investigations into the problem of woolsorters’ disease continued unabated. His notebook indicates that in addition to taking part in the more organized activities of the Commission, he also made trips to various factories in order to speak to the workers themselves. Among the questions that he asked were: ‘What reason is there for the belief that Van Mohair & Alpaca are more dangerous … ?’ and ‘Do those who sort Hair from Central Asia, India & Tibet suffer similarly [to those working on alpaca and mohair]?’49 It is especially noteworthy that in formulating these questions Bell was heavily reliant on the deep-seated belief, established during the 1850s when medical professionals first became interested in woolsorters’ disease, that these particular kinds of fleece were strongly associated with incidences of the condition, an idea to which he clearly also subscribed. He therefore approached his research into the problem with this particular notion – that specific wools were of particular danger – already firmly in his mind. Bell attempted to establish whether there were any other localities that used the same materials thought to be responsible for introducing the disease, and learned from three separate factories that both alpaca and mohair were used in Norwich and Manchester.50 He was particularly concerned with the working conditions, in addition to his experimental and investigatory work with fellow members of the Commission, and this shows his continued belief in the importance of environmental factors in controlling the incidence of the disease. Significantly, around two-thirds of the way through compiling his notebook (the exact date is uncertain), Bell chose to switch from using ‘woolsorters’ disease’ to describe the condition to ‘anthrax’, seemingly marking a fundamental shift in his understanding of the disease. However, the transition away from

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woolsorters’ disease was neither immediate nor complete, as he continued to refer to the condition by both terms until the very end of his career. Also of interest was the range of cases which he included; these varied from a (possibly anecdotal) instance of the disease in Barbados in 1795, contracted ‘from [a] cow with murrain’, through to the individuals associated with the wool industry in West Yorkshire.51 Bell thus collated evidence from a broad range of sources; he scoured the medical press for cases described by other practitioners, and also included those that had come under his own observation (see Figure 1.1).52

Figure 1.1: Details of the first twenty-three cases recorded by Bell in his notebook. He noted the sex, age and occupation of the patients, as well as the result of the case as either recovery (R) or death (D), the duration of illness and any treatments used. Image reproduced from ‘Dr J. H. Bell, Notebook Concerning Anthrax Epidemic in Bradford’, unpaginated, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford, DB15/C5.

Bell’s involvement with woolsorters’ disease encompassed two different approaches. On the one hand he formed part of a strictly causal line of investigation, typified by his role as a central member of the Commission on Woolsorters’ Diseases, whose prime function was to conduct post-mortem examinations and experimental analysis of samples in order to more definitely determine the cause of the illness. However, he was also responsible for collecting another kind of evidence: that of the disease itself. To this end he visited factories, spoke to wool-

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sorters, and charted the ages and occupations of individuals diagnosed with the disease. Although he sought to demonstrate that Bacillus anthracis was the underlying cause, Bell’s approach to woolsorters’ disease was far broader, showing an appreciation for the potential involvement of societal and environmental conditions in disease causation and diagnosis. Indeed, Bell’s description of cases, in contrast to Eurich as we will see later, placed far greater emphasis on the importance of symptoms rather than the identification of Bacillus anthracis. In 1906, the year of his death, Bell asserted that a case under the observation of Eurich – that of a forty-eight-year-old blacksmith from Cleckheaton – ‘was anthrax in spite of negative [microscopical and cultural] results’.53 This was an approach that Bell maintained throughout his career, and his confidence in diagnosis stemmed more from a thorough appreciation of the environmental context of cases, and the signs and symptoms demonstrated by the patient, than from observation of the causative organism microscopically or in culture. One further area in which Bell was involved with woolsorters’ disease was in apportioning potential blame for the occurrence of the disease, which he placed almost exclusively on the shoulders of the employers. We will examine this in more detail in Chapter 2, as a majority of Bell’s efforts in this regard were conducted within the columns of local newspapers and at inquests into cases. He did continue to publish details of further cases in professional journals, and contributed chapters on the condition to Thomas Oliver’s Dangerous Trades and Clifford Allbutt’s widely circulated System of Medicine.54 He continued to publish his work into anthrax and discuss cases through local newspapers and coroners’ inquests until his sudden death in 1906 at the age of seventy-four. Having spent a day consulting patients, he travelled ‘to Morecambe to join his family for a short holiday’ and passed away in his sleep.55 Bell’s status as a champion of the working families of Bradford will be further explored in the following chapter. We now turn to analyse the work of another Bradford physician, Dr Frederick Eurich, who employed a far more laboratory-based approach when dealing with the problems posed by woolsorters’ disease and anthrax. His work differed markedly from that of Bell in the conclusions that he reached about preventive methods, the extent to which he engaged with those working in the industry, and the bacteriological tools that he used during the course of his research.

Frederick William Eurich (1867–1945) Merely a microscopical examination of the serum or of the blood is, of course, insufficient for diagnosis; cultural methods should be employed in all cases.56

Mark Keighley’s recent text, Wool City, paints Eurich as being virtually singlehandedly responsible for ridding Bradford’s wool industry of the scourge of anthrax through a system of disinfection that he himself discovered.57 However, as

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the following section will show, Eurich carried out the bulk of his research under the direction of the AIB, an entity that itself represented collaboration between a number of disparate organizations. Thus the hero of Keighley’s account, while undoubtedly carrying out research that led to an increase in the knowledge surrounding possible methods of anthrax prevention, was in fact often subservient to the wishes of those bankrolling and running the Board: representatives of local capital and labour. It was the relationship between Eurich and the Board that therefore determined the direction in which his work progressed.

Early Life and Training Born in Chemnitz on 1 September 1867, Friederich Wilhelm Eurich, later Frederick William, was the eldest of the five children eventually born to Marie and Carl Eurich, cousins who had married the previous year. The family moved to Bradford in 1875 as a result of Carl’s disillusionment with the economic outlook of the recently formed German Empire. Carl believed that Britain would remain isolated from any troubles, and he sought financial security in the thriving industrial environment of West Yorkshire. Like Bell, Frederick suffered from precarious ill health during his early education, which he completed at Bradford Grammar School. During this period, he was naturalized as a British citizen in 1880.58 Following the advice and encouragement of his father, he began the preparation necessary to study medicine at Edinburgh, where he duly enrolled in May 1886. Postgraduate study followed through the winter of 1891–2 in Heidelberg, where Eurich, under the tutelage of Professor Wilhelm Erb, developed a particular interest in neurology, as well as being schooled in the latest Continental bacteriological techniques that were by then well established within the German university system. However, in December 1892 the firm at which Eurich’s father was employed collapsed, and the young doctor was forced to return home to help support his family.59 So it was that in March of 1893 Eurich took up a post as medical superintendent of the Lancashire County Asylum at Whittingham. The following year, as a result of the departure of the asylum’s resident pathologist, Dr Carter, Eurich was able to engage in a small amount of microscopical research.60 These investigations, which he carried out in addition to his duties as superintendent, laid important foundations for later work as a bacteriologist. It is worth noting that posts such as these were far from common, owing to the lack of resources available for pathology research in the majority of asylums.61 Eurich’s opportunity to move closer to home arrived in a rather fortuitous manner after the death in 1896 of a prominent local practitioner in Bradford, Hermann Bronner. Eurich took over Bronner’s practice and, despite having to re-equip the sparse and aged premises, established himself as a popular figure with his patients. Chief among these were the many German immigrants in Bradford, who were overjoyed ‘to

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find a doctor who could speak German and understand their problems and perplexities’.62 Through this period Eurich was also putting the finishing touches to his MD thesis, influenced by his time in Heidelberg and Whittingham: an investigation into ‘The neuroglia’.63 General practice was a very different kind of endeavour for Eurich after his asylum work; however, it did not remain his sole appointment for long. In 1899 he took the position of third assistant physician at the Royal Eye and Ear Hospital, as well as that of honorary assistant physician to the Bradford Royal Infirmary.64 It was at the former that Eurich first came into direct contact with John Henry Bell, by then past the peak of his powers, but still a consultant physician and well-respected member of the local medical community. Although it is highly unlikely that Eurich had no experience of woolsorters’ disease or anthrax up to this point in his education and career, his proximity to Bell and enthusiasm for medical research doubtless fuelled his curiosity into this local problem. Based largely upon his previous experience in microscopically based pathology, Eurich was appointed to the newly established post of bacteriologist to the City of Bradford in 1900. In this position, which was supported by the Medical Officer of Health as a possible means by which sources of cholera and dysentery might be identified more easily, Eurich commanded an annual salary of £100 and was expected to examine a large number of specimens and samples, mostly of water and milk.65 This position reflected growing feelings throughout Britain that such professional appointments were necessary in order to reduce the impact of infectious diseases: both Bristol and Liverpool had analogous positions by 1904.66 A laboratory of sorts was furnished at the Bradford Technical College for this purpose, although Eurich found conditions such that he nicknamed it ‘the rat-hole’ due to its meagre size and ill-suited equipment.67

The Anthrax Investigation Board Despite the instigation of the so-called Bradford Rules of 1884 – voluntary safety regulations designed to reduce the incidence of woolsorters’ disease – and the national, statutory regulations of 1897 (the latter of which stipulated mandatory washing of fleeces prior to sorting) that had been variously expanded and amended, cases of anthrax were on the increase by the early 1900s.68 In terms of the understanding of the disease, Eurich wrote in 1908 that ‘[i]nvestigations up to 1905 had established the connection of anthrax with the manipulation of foreign wool and hair, but had failed to definitely locate the poison’.69 The earlier findings of Bell and his colleagues therefore had little impact on the incidence of woolsorters’ disease. As a result, local manufacturers and employees formed the Anthrax Investigation Board for Bradford and District (AIB) in July 1905.70 This organization was a collaborative enterprise between the Bradford Chamber of Commerce, from whose premises the Board conducted its activities, and

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various trades unions, and was born out of the Woolsorting and Woolcombing Rules Committee.71 The latter of these consisted of representatives from both employers and employees of wool companies, and acted largely as a forum to ensure fair working conditions, hours and pay. The AIB was founded with three major stated aims: to study cases suspected to be anthrax as and when they occurred, to classify different kinds of wool in terms of the relative threat that they posed, and finally to identify possible measures of rendering these wools harmless to workers.72 It was apparent from the first meeting of the Board that these goals would require ‘[t]he services of a bacteriological expert’ in order to provide microscopical analyses of wool samples and tissues taken post-mortem.73 Eurich’s experience in pathological microscopy at Whittingham, his work as the city bacteriologist and his growing reputation as a general practitioner combined to mark him out as well suited to tackling these challenges. At a meeting of the Board on 30 October 1905, ‘it was unanimously resolved “[t]hat Dr Eurich be appointed bacteriologist”’ to the AIB.74 The notion of bacteriological research being essential to the study of diseases purported to be caused by germs had gained wider credence during the period leading up to Eurich’s appointment, although there was by no means universal belief among medical men (nor indeed the wider public) that bacteriology would provide all the answers in the case of anthrax prevention and treatment.75 The Board resolved to ‘notify users of dangerous wools of Dr Eurich’s appointment, requesting them to communicate with him if a case of anthrax occured [sic]’, and Eurich himself set out to contact practitioners throughout West Yorkshire in order to seek their help in notifying him of suspected cases.76 At the following meeting, Eurich’s duties were concretized when ‘it was suggested that in future [he] should send a report once a month’. These reports detailed the number and nature of cases that had come to his attention (regardless of whether he had attended the patient or made any examination in relation to the incident or not), and summarized the details of the samples of wool that he had analysed.77 Firms from the worsted industry acted as subscribers to the Board, in return for which they were entitled to ‘a copy of Dr Eurich’s report on any case of anthrax that may have occurred at their works’, as well as the annual reports of the AIB.78 Eurich himself was a salaried employee of the Board, at a rate of around £200 p.a., and was thus answerable both to the subscribers – who expected results that had some applicability to their businesses – and to the constituent members of the Board. In addition, the results obtained by Eurich during the course of his work were disseminated via the AIB; summaries of the annual reports appeared in the national and international press as well as in specialist medical journals.79 His affiliation with the AIB therefore imposed a certain level of accountability, which Bell did not feel to the same extent. Nevertheless, despite having access to

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the associated funds, Eurich carried out his research – at least initially – in the ‘rat-hole’ at the Technical College. In these conditions he had to forego many of the safety measures that had become standard practice in factories where wool was sorted, such as fans to draw away potentially harmful material from the samples of wool.80 At this stage of investigation the vast majority of medical practitioners still considered mohair and alpaca to be the most likely candidates for harbouring the causative organism of anthrax, and they therefore required especially careful handling on the part of Eurich. During the course of his first three years working for the AIB, Eurich became the first person to successfully culture anthrax bacilli directly from samples of wool and dust collected from the sorting-rooms, thanks in a large part to his development of a sub-surface agar technique that prevented other bacteria from crowding out the significant organism.81 Wool firms sent samples of wool from all sources and of all kinds to Eurich, and he set about attempting to classify these according to potential risk.82 This he did largely through simply culturing for any bacteria present in the samples, and observing how frequently Bacillus anthracis appeared in the various kinds of wool. The condition of the wool was also taken into account in order to test the popular notion that so-called fallen fleeces, taken from dead animals, presented a greater danger to the sorters. He reported his conclusions after three years’ work for the Board at a meeting on 5 October 1908, and the other members (and indeed the Lord Mayor of Bradford, who sent a note of congratulation to the AIB for its work) viewed his findings as a significant step forward in understanding, if not eradicating, the disease. Eurich stated that: 1) Blood-stained wool or hair is the carrier of the germs of anthrax 2) Dust may prove dangerous in virtue of the brittle scales of dried blood-clots derived from such tainted material 3) It follows that a fallen fleece is dangerous in the measure in which it is bloodstained & that pieces of wool or hair, if blood-stained, may be dangerous.83

This represented a significant departure from the prevalent medical opinion that fallen fleeces, regardless of the presence of dust or blood, posed the greatest threat to sorters. Eurich’s findings, and the difficulty that sorters then faced in identifying the often very lightly blood-stained materials, led the Board to recommend that he educate those at risk as to how to recognize the potentially dangerous fleeces. In consequence, Eurich gave a well-received presentation detailing his findings to the National Union of Woolsorters in Bradford on 30 October 1908, including a practical demonstration of how to recognize very small blood clots in different kinds of wool.84 Having identified the samples of wool from which the bacillus was successfully cultured, Eurich proceeded to test various disinfectants and disinfection

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processes in order to determine the extent to which these samples might be rendered safe. Eurich conducted a series of trials of disinfection on different wools over the next five years using pressurized steam, some of which were held at Bradford Technical College, others at the factories themselves.85 He also ‘carried out a number of experiments in regard to germicidal solutions and electrical sterilization’, and initially identified Cyllin, Germaphoid and formaldehyde as being the most promising chemical disinfectants.86 Having later established the inefficacy of both Cyllin and Germaphoid at killing anthrax spores, Eurich reported in 1914 that ‘1 part in 9 parts of water (=4%) [sic] killed [anthrax spores] in less than 1 hour’.87 During the course of his work, Eurich challenged prevailing conclusions concerning the efficacy of various disinfectants, criticizing ‘the method employed by Professor [Edward] Klein [one of the foremost bacteriologists of the period] … for testing the disinfecting powers of [C]yllin and allied compounds’.88 Page had reported in 1909 that ‘Eurich found that [C]yllin 1% will destroy anthrax spores on wool after steeping one hour’, although this would prove to be something of a false dawn in terms of finding an effective disinfectant as the fleeces were found to be significantly damaged by this particular preparation.89 However successful a substance might be at removing dangerous spores, it was useless in practical terms if the wool was rendered worthless. Eurich’s disagreement with the methods employed by Klein was not restricted to the domain of professional medical discourse. At the Congress of the Royal Sanitary Institute in 1908, Eurich read a paper in which he argued that Cyllin was not as effective as Klein had earlier suggested in an official disinfection certificate.90 Less than a month later, Eurich received a letter from the manufacturers of Cyllin – the large and powerful Jeyes Sanitary Compounds Company – accusing him of making ‘certain disparaging remarks’ concerning Cyllin, which were ‘calculated to injure the reputation and injuriously affect the sale’ of Jeyes’s product.91 The Jeyes Company mobilized the fact that Klein had certified Cyllin as effective in their defence, and Eurich had been dragged into a dispute that went beyond the realms of the laboratory. He drafted a response, and it is clear to see where the discrepancy between his own results and those of Klein arose: the first statement is simply a report on a number of experiments the results of which are an irrefutable proof that Cyllin – whatever it can do in the test tube – cannot when in 2% solution, kill anthrax spores with certainty under the conditions in which they are present in wool.92

In line with the brief provided for him by the AIB, Eurich was therefore interested in the application of disinfectants to the practical problem of ensuring the safety of wool, while Klein had no such concerns. The Jeyes Company were less than satisfied with Eurich’s response, and they urged him ‘to withdraw so sweeping and casual a criticism’ of Cyllin.93 This clearly riled Eurich, who sought the advice

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of his colleague, Thomas Morison Legge, then Medical Inspector of Factories. Legge assured Eurich that he would receive the backing of the British Medical Association in the matter, and no further communications were received from the Jeyes Company.94 This episode highlights two important aspects of Eurich’s work. Firstly, he was concerned not solely with laboratory-based experimentation, but also with the disinfection of wool as it appeared in industry: he was thus applying bacteriological tools to a practical, sanitary problem. Secondly, medical practitioners in this period faced difficulties when criticizing branded products, particularly after such products had received endorsement from fellow practitioners elsewhere. Eurich’s research therefore had significant implications for the medical marketplace as companies such as Jeyes sought to defend the efficacy of their preparations. The work carried out by Eurich for the AIB provides particular interest on a number of other levels. Critically, his classification of wools appeared to confirm the notion that imported fleeces carried with them the greatest risk, even if he dispelled long-held notions about the danger of specific wools. As Eurich himself wrote: Taking all in all, I think that East Indian goat-hair is an easy first [the most dangerous] with approximately 30 per cent. positive results, closely followed by East Indian cashmere and Egyptian wool; then follow Persian wool, East Indian wool, and mohair. In addition we must consider Syrian wool, Tunisian and Mediterranean wool, and Chinese wool and goat-hair and alpaca dangerous.95

However, Eurich also found that classifying fallen fleeces as being more dangerous than those taken from healthy animals presented a number of problems, not least because of the difficulties of identifying such specimens. He criticized the idea that ‘[f ]allen and damaged fleeces’ should be ‘considered particularly dangerous to handle’, and wrote in 1912 that: It is obvious that this regulation will depend upon an accurate knowledge of the distinguishing characters of such fleeces. The regulation assumes the possession of such knowledge. But, as a matter-of-fact, till recently not a single opener or sorter possessed this knowledge concerning a fallen fleece.96

Moreover, a far more accurate indicator of the potential of a fleece to contain anthrax bacilli or spores was the presence of blood stains. Again, however, this proved so difficult for the woolsorters to identify, particularly among the darkercoloured fleeces (which comprised the most dangerous classes), that removing these prior to either importing or sorting was not a practical solution, despite Eurich’s attempts to illustrate the signs to woolsorters. Washing fleeces containing these blood clots was again troublesome, as ‘pieces of blood-clot will detach themselves from the wool-fibre in the bath, only to be caught up again when the

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wool is removed from the washbowl; the subsequent process of drying will, of course, simply fix such a clot once more to the fibre’.97 Eurich also discounted the general cleanliness and appearance of the fleece as an accurate indicator of potential danger, as ‘[w]ool and mohair washed beautifully clean and of silky lustre may yet have retained its deadly properties’.98 Significantly, the kinds of workers most at risk in the wool trade had also moved from the sorters to those working further along the production line as a result of special attention paid to the plight of the woolsorters. This was due in no small part to the at-risk demographic that the term ‘woolsorters’ disease’ suggested: Their [the Bradford Rules’] effect upon the incidence of anthrax has been marked. The number of cases has been very greatly diminished; but this diminution has occurred almost solely amongst those operatives who would come in contact with the unwashed raw material, e.g., the openers and sorters.99

Eurich therefore argued that althovugh mandatory washing of the fleeces prior to sorting had lessened the number of cases, this had occurred in a group of employees whom the regulations were not designed to protect; a more rigorous disinfection process was required in order to render fleeces safe for workers at all stages of the manufacturing process. The fact that cases were now being observed more frequently among carders and combers of wool rather than the sorters also gives some indication as to why the term ‘woolsorters’ disease’ was used less frequently to refer to the condition. To this end, and largely as a result of petitions made to government by a good friend of Eurich, Frederick William Jowett, a local Labour Member of Parliament, a Home Office Departmental Committee of Inquiry (DCI) was established in 1913 to investigate further the possibility of disinfection on an industrial scale.100 Chapter 4 will discuss the development of regulation and legislation in more detail. Suffice it to say here that Eurich, following on from his work with the AIB, was appointed as a member of the DCI, and collaborated with a factory inspector, G. Elmhirst Duckering, in order to conduct further investigation into disinfection processes. The AIB’s endeavours, which had been assumed by the members at its inception to last for ‘no less than three years’, continued for far longer, and the apparent lack of progress in terms of practical application also drew criticism from some quarters.101 At a meeting of the Bradford branch of the National Union of Woolsorters in 1910, Jowett – despite being a close acquaintance of Eurich – declared that he: was not satisfied with the results of the Anthrax Investigation Board’s operations. They were very pertinacious indeed in hunting for the particular form and make-up of the microbe that was responsible for the disease, but there were more practical questions relating to the qualities of the material imported into the city to be handled by human beings.102

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This led to various members of the Board ‘taking up the cudgel in [its] defence’, and although they argued strongly that there was promise in the work of Eurich, the Bradford and District Trades and Labour Council, who shared in Jowett’s frustrations, decided to withdraw its members.103 Although this removed the sole representatives of employees from the AIB, the continued support of the Bradford Chamber of Commerce and the Home Office ensured that the research program continued uninterrupted. These criticisms, presented by men such as Jowett, concerned not only the perceived failure of the AIB to provide practical (as opposed to theoretical) means by which anthrax might be prevented in the wool industry, but also the lack of legislative progress. Indeed, the Board had made explicit their desire to avoid the burden of unnecessary regulations, and ‘urged upon the Members of Parliament the desirability of the Board being unhampered by legislation so long as the Board’s operations have not proved unsuccessful’.104

Forensic Medicine In addition to his contributions under the umbrella of the AIB, Eurich also acted as an expert witness at the inquests into a number of cases of suspected anthrax. His role here encompassed both bacteriological and more general investigation, analysing samples in order to confirm anthrax as the cause of death as well as commenting on whether adequate safety precautions had been taken by the employer(s). In this respect, one might be tempted to view Eurich as a direct successor to Bell’s role, offering expert medical advice at coroners’ investigations. However, while Bell acted more as an advocate on behalf of the woolsorters and attempted to place blame of the disease on the employers for failing to comply with the recommended safety measures, Eurich was not only a general practitioner but also holder of the Chair in Forensic Medicine at the University of Leeds from 1908. Under the auspices of this position, Eurich presented independent medical evidence at a number of inquests into deaths from suspected woolsorters’ disease.105 Following the cessation of the work of both the DCI and the AIB in 1917 and 1919 respectively, Eurich continued to publish across a broad spectrum of medical subjects.106 He had, by combining bacteriological, cultural analysis in cases of suspected anthrax with attempts to provide a classificatory system for wools, established himself as one of the leading authorities on the subject, and certainly the foremost in the West Riding of Yorkshire.107 However, the statuses of Bell and Eurich as being the leading local experts on woolsorters’ disease – or anthrax in the case of Eurich – is virtually the only similarity that might be found between these two individuals, who have been so often conflated in the historiography.

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Conclusion This chapter has argued that the most thorough explanation of the respective methodologies and conclusions reached by John Henry Bell and Frederick William Eurich lies in the institutional basis under which they conducted their research. There is a sense in which the differences between their work can be regarded as being historically uninteresting: the ever-increasing importance afforded to microscopy and bacteriology in Britain itself may be seen to explain why this kind of investigation was practised intensively by Eurich and only sporadically by Bell. However, this does not take into account the factors that directly influenced the scope of their research. Bell conducted his initial work into woolsorters’ disease alone, and without any formal research framework; he found spare time in which to carry out inoculation experiments, and took materials to investigate from cases which he had personally attended. He was thus directly involved with both patients and their families and had first-hand evidence of the conditions under which sufferers had been working. As a result of this hands-on approach, Bell felt confident in ascribing the label of ‘woolsorters’ disease’ primarily through symptoms; in some cases he failed to find any examples of Bacillus anthracis in the course of post-mortem examination, yet still attributed death to the condition. As Eurich himself later pointed out, Bell had in fact equated woolsorters’ disease with anthrax before many others felt that there was sufficient evidence to support such a claim.108 This was perhaps best exemplified in Bell’s 1880 paper delivered to the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society. Bell can be further contrasted with his contemporary, William Smith Greenfield, head of the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution in London.109 Greenfield, who has been written of as a possible rival to Pasteur in terms of producing the first vaccine against anthrax in animals, took vaccination as his priority.110 He was convinced that a modified or attenuated ‘virus’ would provide immunity to possible future infections with the fully virulent ‘wild-type’. After conducting various experiments testing vaccines in animals, some of which were effective, Greenfield argued that the same technique could be used to produce an effectual human vaccine.111 Bell made no such endeavours, as the provincial setting of Bradford, combined with the attendant difficulty of obtaining a licence to practise vivisection, effectively closed off this avenue to him.112 Moreover, he was largely concerned with the disease in man and did not cite the researches of Koch and Pasteur in his own work. Eurich’s own attitude towards the problem of disease among employees in the wool trade was that it could be solved using laboratory-based techniques applied to the factory environment. His work for the AIB involved the microscopical and cultural analysis of almost 14,000 samples, and he gradually built up a picture of which kinds of wool posed the greatest threat to the health of

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those working with the fleeces.113 As we will see in more detail in Chapter 5, Eurich included elements of Kochian microbiology alongside older, sanitary approaches to the problem of anthrax by first classifying fleeces and then demonstrating practical preventive measures to local workers. A closer analysis of the way in which Bell and Eurich approached the problem of disease in the wool industry in fact reveals significant differences between the two; in no sense can the latter’s work be seen as a natural continuation of the former’s. This is explicable on a number of different levels, reflecting the social and institutional positions of Bell and Eurich as well as developments in medical tools and theoretical approaches. Firstly, Bell and Eurich were arguably investigating different diseases, despite their common interest in preserving the health of those most at risk. When Bell conducted his initial enquiries into the nature of woolsorters’ disease, the received explanation at the time was that dust, dirt and generally poor working conditions were to blame. The very label of ‘woolsorters’ disease’ held connotations that encouraged medical practitioners to look in the place of work for a potential cause (and cure); Bell’s gaze was also naturally drawn to those in particular occupations. By the time Eurich had entered the research domain, anthrax had come to dominate. Here was a disease caused by an invading organism, which could not be overcome simply by modifying the factory environment; it required the calculating and controlled setting of the laboratory to determine how to adequately disinfect the fleeces. Eurich therefore combined existing approaches with bacteriological tools, using laboratory practices to achieve sanitary goals. The mere fact that the term ‘woolsorters’ disease’ does not appear in any single instance in the minute book of the AIB at any stage during that organization’s existence (1905– 19) illustrates this. One should therefore not be surprised that these two medical investigators undertook their work in contrasting fashions: Bell was concerned primarily with ‘woolsorters’ disease’, while Eurich’s focus was on ‘anthrax’. Secondly, Bell and Eurich were working within markedly different institutional environments. Eurich, for whom funding came from the Home Office and various factory owners and employers, held a practical responsibility of improving working conditions. However, the perceived necessity of a laboratory-based investigation of wool types and disinfection methods led to a tension between the AIB and those whom it sought to benefit. Bell laboured under no such expectations, as the Commission on Woolsorters’ Diseases reported solely to the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society. The original safety measures suggested by Bell and his colleagues, chiefly the washing of fleeces prior to sorting and provision of adequate ventilation, appeared to have little effect on the incidence of the disease. They considered that water and/or heat, coupled with fans to draw away the bacilliharbouring (or, for some of Bell’s contemporaries, disease-causing) dust, would be quite sufficient to negate any danger. The diagnostic methods that the Com-

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mission used showed a continued reliance upon the symptoms, the prevalence of illness among other sorters in the vicinity and the type of wool being sorted. This chapter has shown how woolsorters’ disease and anthrax were treated by the professional medical community of Bradford. There were, however, numerous stakeholders in the town, all of whom had a vested interest in stamping out anthrax from the wool industry. Bradford’s public domain will accordingly be the subject of the following chapter. Here we will see how the professional research discussed in this chapter mapped onto the collective local consciousness. In doing so, the work of Bell and Eurich will be more thoroughly contextualized, illuminating the relationship between medical and lay knowledge, as well as the relationship between the specialist researcher and the sorters themselves, and highlighting the important role played by the local press. Indeed, we will see how the cultural and social life of Bradford played a critical role in determining the identity of both woolsorters’ disease and anthrax long before medical practitioners began to define the diseases according to their biological properties.

2 WOOLSORTERS’ DISEASE, ANTHRAX AND BRADFORD PUBLICS

Though he had retired from practice eight years ago, his works still remained fresh in the memory of his colleagues and the public at large, and none had been a more notable citizen when resident in their midst.1

Frederick William Eurich spent the bulk of his time huddled over a microscope in the laboratory analysing samples of blood, wool and hair, trying to culture micro-organisms, yet the residents of Bradford regarded him first and foremost as a benevolent figure of authority. As the Yorkshire Observer noted on his death in February 1945, Eurich ‘did so much to conquer the disease of anthrax and … [his] contributions in the cause of medicine were so outstanding’.2 That Eurich became so widely admired across Bradford for his research demonstrates that there existed, alongside his inward-looking work in connection with the medical profession, a vibrant, dynamic and very public identity for anthrax and, earlier, woolsorters’ disease in the public domain. This chapter seeks to examine the ways in which these two conditions were represented to, and constructed by, the ordinary citizens of Bradford, and to contrast the resulting cultural understandings with the attitudes of medical practitioners explored in the previous chapter. Here we will see how a vibrant public discourse emerged surrounding anthrax and woolsorters’ disease, aided by a lively local press. In order to appreciate the context of public discussion of anthrax in this period, we will firstly examine the broad social role and status of Bradford’s local press, before charting the emergence of the concept of woolsorters’ disease prior to 1878. Then, the death of woolsorter Samuel Firth in 1881 and subsequent wrangling over who, if anyone, was responsible for his demise will demonstrate that newspapers were key in offering a forum for public debate. Finally, we shall look at the rising dominance of anthrax over woolsorters’ disease and the different cultural meanings that accompanied this incomplete yet significant shift. The chapter will necessarily place more emphasis on the early part of the period, as this is when the complex cultural meanings attached to woolsorters’ disease became ingrained in the public domain. The ponderous migration of anthrax

– 41 –

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from medical discourse into the wider, non-specialist context can be viewed as a result of the firm foothold that woolsorters’ disease held in the public consciousness. Notwithstanding the importance of new evidence from workers and employers, alongside the findings of medical figures such as Bell and his contemporaries, folk assumptions about both woolsorters’ disease and anthrax continued to persist. Particularly prominent among these was the perception that Turkish mohair (widely known as Van mohair after its specific region of origin) was the most dangerous fibre used in the factories of Bradford. The public fear associated with Van mohair had a powerful influence in the town, and continued to do so even after Eurich had presented evidence to suggest that other varieties of wool presented a greater danger to workers. Cultural and social factors therefore continued to play an important role in defining the ‘new’ disease of anthrax and shaping the medical and political debates around disease identity. In analysing the added public layer of interest surrounding woolsorters’ disease and anthrax in Bradford and the West Riding, this chapter will show that these conditions were presented (and understood) in the popular periodical press in a very different manner from within the medical profession. We can thus use these periodicals as tools, through which it is demonstrable that the public and professional understandings of woolsorters’ disease and anthrax each had their own socio-cultural assumptions, many of which persisted over long periods of time independently of medical and scientific research.

Local Newspapers in the Cultural Life of Bradford Bradford in the period of this study was dominated by two major local newspapers, the Bradford Observer (f. 1834) and the Bradford Daily Telegraph (f. 1868). The Bradford Observer represented a new departure in communicating issues of national importance to local residents. The Leeds Mercury and Manchester Guardian were at the time the only major rival publications in the region, and this remained the case until the Bradford Daily Telegraph was established over three decades later. The Observer’s principles were based solely around the political goals of its ninety shareholders; campaigns for ‘[m]ore frequent parliaments, an end to tithes and church rates, abolition of the pension list, municipal reform, [and] the repeal of the Corn Laws’ were chief among these.3 William Byles, then a young, London-based writer whose work was published principally in the Athenaeum, was appointed as the first editor and informed in no uncertain terms of the agenda that the shareholders envisaged for the paper. The middle-class status of the paper’s proprietors was to a large extent reflected in the readership; the Observer never seriously attained support from the working class.4 Byles, frustrated with what he perceived to be a cumbersome strategy on the part of the paper’s founders, bought the paper outright in 1840 and began to put across the middle-of-the-road liber-

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alism in ‘a more subtle way’.5 It is at this point that the historical account of the political development of the Observer comes grinding to a halt. From the moment of the takeover onwards the Bradford Observer simply becomes part of the Byles family fabric, and the associated attitudes displayed in its columns are explained as a direct result of this. William Byles’s son, William Pollard Byles, took over from his father and, latterly as a liberal MP for Shipley (1892–5) and Salford (1906– 17), continued the paper in the vein of moderate liberalism. The origin of the Bradford Observer has been the subject of a number of enquiries by historians. Theodore Koditschek places strong emphasis on the role of this publication in representing the views of liberal entrepreneurs from the city, while David James concentrates particularly on the relationship between the Observer and its first editor, William Byles, to whom James ascribes a great deal of influence over the paper’s editorial policy during its early years.6 The Observer itself occupied a political position of ‘moderate liberalism’, with a ‘social and moral code which appeared hostile to both Trade Union development and advanced social theories’.7 The principal appeal of the paper was therefore to a well-established ‘moderate middle-class readership’.8 The problem of woolsorters’ disease filled numerous columns of the Observer from the 1850s onwards, and one explanation of this rests on the nature and personality of William Byles. Byles was a selective campaigner who only sporadically picked issues with which to engage, while he continued to ‘preach liberal orthodoxy’.9 Jones makes a persuasive argument for the role that publications such as the Observer and the neighbouring Leeds Mercury had in driving the formation of political factions, yet largely ignores the extent to which these papers became involved with woolsorters’ disease – a topic that, as we shall see in later chapters, became increasingly politicized through the nineteenth century. His work does acknowledge that woolsorting was among ‘[t]he most notoriously unhealthy job in the Bradford woollen industry’, but his analysis of periodicals is limited to the link between their respective political agendas and the employer–employee relationship.10 This chapter will show that the Bradford Observer did not simply function within this single dimension. Rather, it acted both as a forum for exchange of information within and across social groups, and as an active constructor of public information concerning the nature and significance of woolsorters’ disease through dozens of leading articles on the subject. The Bradford Daily Telegraph arrived on the scene in 1868 and unashamedly identified itself as a direct rival to the Observer, forcing the latter to move from a weekly to a daily format from October of that year. Cheaper than its competitor at just a penny (the Observer was sold either unstamped at two pence or stamped at three pence), the Daily Telegraph determined to undermine what it saw as the overly cautious liberalism of its competitor. As Jones has noted, there was a marked contrast between the approaches of the two papers in terms of politi-

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cal leaning, as the Daily Telegraph occupied a more radical niche, this at a time when Bradford was the breeding ground for a number of different varieties of liberalism.11 As this chapter will ultimately show, the coverage given to woolsorters’ disease and anthrax by the two papers was remarkably similar despite their differing political orientations, demonstrating that these differences counted for little when such a visceral issue of industrial health was on the table.

Early Coverage of a New Illness [I]f those precautions are taken, and timely treatment applied when really necessary, I do not think that you and your friends need be under any alarm on account of your trade.12

‘The Lurking Evil’ The traditional historical narrative concerning woolsorters’ disease in the local press (and indeed in general) has argued that interest in the illness was instigated by a letter published in the Bradford Observer in 1878.13 In fact medical investigation into specific ill health among woolsorters and subsequent reporting of this began in 1855, when Samuel Lodge, Sr, a local medical practitioner, recommended safety measures to combat a mysterious disease among sorters. At this stage practitioners considered the illness to be a chronic one, and Lodge, Sr argued on the basis of post-mortem results that the condition was due to build-up of dust, hair and lime in the lungs of the operatives.14 Lodge, Sr also stated that chlorinating the air of the sorting room would be a ‘preventative which would never fail’.15 Newspaper coverage over the following two decades was sporadic, and only the occasional article remarking on a suspicious death was published, such as that alluded to in a letter to the Observer from Sutcliffe Rhodes, ‘a highly literate and energetic working man’, in 1867.16 Rhodes also commented on the condition the following year, in response to the suggestion submitted by ‘M. B.’ to the Observer that ‘all whose occupation causes them to inhale dust and other impurities [should] wear a mask of fine gauze’ in order to prevent the accumulation of dust and hair in the lungs.17 Rhodes roundly dismissed the suggestion, arguing that ‘that plan has been tried and failed’.18 The sporadic nature of the debate surrounding the health of woolsorters changed in 1874, however, with the publication of a pamphlet by William Henry Ellis, a respected local medical practitioner based at Shipley, entitled Some Observations on the so-called Sorters’ Disease. This was the first occasion when this term was ascribed to the condition in a textual source.19 The Observer, responding to the pamphlet, noted that ‘most of our readers will be aware that several deaths of men employed in woolsorting have been supposed to have been caused by a special disease, which has been called the sorters’

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disease’.20 The paper was therefore confident that woolsorters’ disease was by then familiar to the Bradford public, and this shows that the illness had a discrete life and identity before it appeared in print. The fact that the Observer commended Ellis’s publication to its readers also provides an important indication as to the paper’s position on the issue of woolsorters’ disease at this point. As Reynolds has noted, Ellis conducted his investigations into a possible connection between woolsorters’ employment and a specific medical condition with the support of a ‘philanthropic gentleman (probably Titus [Salt] junior)’, and the result was ‘an unhelpful pamphlet which managed to transfer most of the responsibility for the sickness to the sorters themselves’.21 The Observer referred to Ellis’s work as being ‘written in a perfectly fair and impartial spirit’, highlighting that at this point the paper considered the workers themselves to be largely responsible for their own well-being. In response to Ellis’s pamphlet, Sutcliffe Rhodes gave a talk to ‘a special meeting of the woolsorters of Bradford and district’, which strongly criticized the medical basis of Ellis’s suggestions and further argued that workers should be paid proportionately more in light of the danger associated with sorting foreign wools. This was reported at some length in the columns of the Observer, and both Rhodes and Ellis defended their respective positions in print.22 Ellis objected in strong terms to the manner in which his own work was portrayed, noting that he ‘did not expect to please Mr Rhodes, whom I [Ellis] certainly have not to thank for any assistance’.23 However, the most striking difference between the positions of Rhodes and Ellis lay in their views on the way in which the problem should be tackled, with the former arguing that ‘better remuneration for wool sorters’ labour [was] imperatively necessary’, while the latter did not see fit to enter into this realm and restricted his comments solely to working conditions.24 Rhodes replied in print on 7 January 1875, citing medical support for his position from Mr S. Rhind, for whom Ellis had previously acted as an assistant.25 The most significant point at issue, however, was not whether a specific disease existed – or even what the nature of it might be – but how those workers who were perceived to be at risk might be safeguarded (in both monetary and practical terms). It was not until over three years later, however, that the debate re-entered the pages of local newspapers in any substantive form; when it did so, the focus was far more firmly on the medical rather than the social or economic aspects of the condition.

‘Scarcely before Heard of by Many’ Following John Henry Bell’s first paper on the subject of woolsorters’ disease, given to the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society on 5 February 1878 (see previous chapter), the letter traditionally associated with kick-starting discussion surrounding the illness appeared on 27 February. Despite the fact that this was

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signed anonymously (the author identified himself merely as ‘X’), it is probable that the writer was in fact a member of the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society – Dr William F. Rawson – who had been present at Bell’s paper on woolsorters’ disease earlier in the same month.26 At this stage the contents of Bell’s paper had not yet entered the periodical press, and the suggestion from ‘X’ that ‘the wool itself, or the shed in which it was sorted’ was ‘specially unwholesome’ echoed the views of Bell.27 This points to a medical connection for the author and enhances the possibility that it was penned by Rawson, who also lived at Low Moor – the same address given by ‘X’. The letter was headed by the Observer as ‘Death from Blood Poisoning in Bradford’, and it noted that ‘[w]ithin a month three woolsorters have died from blood poisoning contracted in the same shed of the same factory’.28 The author blamed ‘[o]ccasional deaths from blood poisoning’ on ‘the handling of some foreign wools’ and insisted that these were preventable.29 The intensive discussion and exchange of letters that followed were therefore instigated not by someone directly associated with the wool industry, but most likely from the hand of a medical practitioner. Two authors responded to the correspondence from ‘X’ followed over subsequent days, with both preserving their anonymity. Each offered very different approaches to the topic. ‘Chirurgicus’ noted that ‘[w]oolsorters have a peculiarly unhealthy occupation’, and confidently asserted that it was ‘now generally admitted by medical men resident in this locality that this fatality is due to a direct organic poison’, and that the resulting condition was just as ‘destructive to human life as the much dreaded hydrophobia or any cerebro-spinal poison’. His communication suggested that employers were alert to the potential danger posed by the disease, and that ‘manufacturers will offer every assistance to scientific enquiry’.30 By way of contrast, ‘Yorkshire’ gave an account of the atmosphere in which the sorters themselves worked, describing the opening of the bales and onset of woolsorters’ disease thus: Van mohair, to use a sorter’s phrase, emits on opening ‘a stench like a grave’. The sorter having got over the smell, breathes an atmosphere so dense from dust and infinitesimally small hairs that his neighbour at the next board cannot see him; his nostrils are stuffed, his lungs are clogged. One day begins the disease. The sorter comes home, but his meal is untouched. Next day he complains of pains in back and chest. Still he struggles on till in a few days he is missed. In terrible agony the poor fellow has met the ‘Woolsorters’ death’.31

The vivid picture painted by ‘Yorkshire’ must be taken with caution, however, as two letters in their turn responded to his, noting that the account showed ‘him to be [to] a gross extent practically ignorant of the subject on which he writes’, and having ‘taken up his pen with little knowledge of the subject’.32 It is particularly striking that ‘Yorkshire’ refers to ‘terrible agony’ on the part of

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the unfortunate sufferer, while medical accounts of the time refer almost exclusively to a total absence of pain, even in the moments immediately before death. Even in the early stages of discussion within the forum of the Bradford Observer, therefore, there was disagreement among correspondents about the nature of the disease(s), the dangers of different classes of wool and the occupation of woolsorting in general. These mirrored the debates concerning the origins and cause of the disease within the medical community discussed in the previous chapter; in both domains the identity, scope and characteristics of woolsorters’ disease were the subject of intense negotiation. A leading article in the Bradford Observer on 5 March 1878 suggested, contrary to opinions expressed in correspondence, that ‘the malady known as sorters’ disease is but an extreme case of the usual results of bad ventilation, which do not require the aid of any subtle poison to account for the end’.33 Although the subject merited ‘the fullest medical attention’, the Observer noted, ‘so long as the lungs are healthy and have plenty of fresh air, they have the power of getting rid of such foreign substances without serious injury’.34 This attitude reflected the popularity among the general population (and a significant minority of medical practitioners) of miasmatic theories of disease in this period. The link between disease and cleanliness led the Observer to conclude that one of the most necessary measures in preventing woolsorters’ disease was the provision of ‘proper breathing space’ for the workers; overcrowding in factories, coupled with the ‘close, heavy, and irritating’ dust, were the principal dangers. The Observer also interestingly drew attention to the fact that woolsorters’ disease was ‘scarcely before heard of by many’, contradicting its earlier assertion of familiarity on the part of its readers. It is far more likely that the ‘many’ referred to here were in fact those living both in Bradford and elsewhere, where cases of the disease were unknown.35 In the same issue, the Observer published the proceedings of an inquest held into the death of Sargeant Ellis, which had also attracted attention in neighbouring Leeds.36 This was to become a major feature of the role that local newspapers played in disseminating information regarding woolsorters’ disease. Because the papers detailed testimonies from relatives, medical practitioners and fellow workers, the public had access to a wide variety of evidence on the symptoms associated with the disease, the working conditions of sorters and the cause of death. This particular case – where the jury returned the verdict that ‘[d]eceased had died from pyaemia (blood poisoning) by breathing vitiated air caused by imperfect ventilation while sorting mohair in a room at the works of Messrs Mitchell Brothers, Manchester Road, Bradford’ – was also reported verbatim in the Daily Telegraph.37 Despite the medical opinion expressed at the inquest, the Observer doubted ‘whether it would be found that death from woolsorters’ disease is usually blood-poisoning’.38 Clearly, then, the Observer was not simply reporting passively on developments in particular cases of woolsorters’ disease; rather, the paper was an active participant

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in framing public knowledge concerning the nature of the condition itself, even going against prevailing medical opinion. The Daily Telegraph argued that ‘the evidence left no doubt that the poor fellow had been killed by blood poisoning resulting from sorting mohair which was somehow in a pestiferous condition’.39 The Daily Telegraph did not comment on whether workmen or employers were to blame for these deaths, but the fact that ‘Van mohair should carry with it infection … [was] not at all surprising when one considers the recent statements as to the habits of the inhabitants of that district [Turkey]’.40 In light of this, the paper argued, effective ventilation, the lack of which was responsible for ‘the poor fellow’s death’, should be secured for sorters, ‘even against [their] wishes’.41 This highlights the commitment at an early stage of the Daily Telegraph’s involvement with woolsorters’ disease to provide legislation to protect workers and improve the factory conditions. Following the continuing arguments that woolsorting might be a peculiarly dangerous occupation (and for as yet unsubstantiated reasons), it was perhaps unsurprising that Sargeant Ellis’s former employers, Mitchell Brothers, chose the columns of the Bradford Observer to air a defence of conditions on their premises. One of three letters on 7 March, just two days after the leading articles had appeared in the Observer and Daily Telegraph, put the case for the manufacturer and focused on the ‘vagueness in the term “imperfect ventilation”’, which was ‘calculated to mislead the public’. The employers argued that the death rate following the introduction of Van mohair into their business had in fact fallen, and that their sorters ‘work fewer hours, that less weight is sorted per man (for the same money) and consequently there is less dust to contend with than is the case at any other firm in the trade’.42 This letter also referred to the prospect of improving ventilation, a suggestion originally put forward by Bell, who had presumably passed this on either before or immediately after his paper to the Medico-Chirurgical Society. This suggests that the medical community was not acting in isolation, behind closed doors, in this period. Bell clearly felt that the practical implications of his work were significant, and therefore resolved to dispense his advice on prevention freely and directly to the manufacturers. Mitchell Brothers would ultimately return to the correspondence columns on two further occasions, primarily in order to argue that conditions under which woolsorters worked were neither the cause of disease nor sufficiently poor with respect to other employers or kindred occupations.43 Other letters on the same day demonstrated two rather different approaches to the subject. ‘One Who Has Suffered’ claimed that ‘the dusts arising from the various descriptions of mohair and alpaca are extremely irritable to the respiratory organs, and liable to produce in any person sorting it … inflammation of the lungs’. His (one can presume at this stage that the author was male) suggestion was to ‘let the mohair be steamed sufficiently to prevent dust rising, and sorted whilst

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damp’, thereby ensuring that the atmosphere was free from the small particles that were alleged to cause the condition.44 The third and final letter of that day in the Observer took a more light-hearted approach to the subject. Writing under the name ‘Van Mohair’, the correspondent defended that particular (and notorious) fleece and denied ‘that the mortality among sorters is owing to my class of mohair almost exclusively’.45 Although the point made – that Van mohair was not the only dangerous material to be used in the trade – appeared serious enough, the manner in which it was put across suggests a degree of satire on the part of the author. The Observer itself suggested that the variety of viewpoints expressed in its columns would ‘afford material on which the public may form an opinion’.46 The paper was active in putting forward its own perspective on the causes of deaths, however. In response to Mitchell Brothers’ attempts to demonstrate that there was not a significantly higher mortality among woolsorters than other professions, a leading article argued that the significant point was rather ‘whether there is not an obvious and admitted cause of death among woolsorters which does not act on the general community. The answer to this question is given by the mere fact that the phrase “woolsorters’ disease” is in existence at all’.47 The assumption here, made on the part of the Observer, was that a specific medical condition that affected those working in the wool industry did in fact exist. Whether or not the paper was justified in making such a claim is something of a moot point, however; of greater significance was its confident pronouncement that deaths associated with the disease were singularly preventable. The Observer drew on the analogy between dry-grinders in ‘the Sheffield [cutlery and steel] trade’. Keeping ‘clear the air which naturally enters the lungs’, by whatever means, would act to achieve the eradication of the condition.48 This firm belief rested on the success of the practice of employing fans in other trades, as there had been in Sheffield.49 The claim by Mitchell Brothers that woolsorters were themselves a healthy group of working men drew a response from Bradford’s Medical Officer of Health, Harris Butterfield. Butterfield did not carry out systematic investigation into the condition itself, but rather demonstrated that according to the general statistics on mortality which were available to him, ‘woolsorting is by no means the terribly dangerous occupation which may persons imagine it to be’.50 Butterfield’s analysis was based on the evidence that, for example, consumption, bronchitis and pneumonia occurred less frequently among woolsorters than in the general population. He acknowledged, however, that ‘occasionally samples of mohair arrive impregnated with an animal poison, which, if it enters the circulation may give rise to very dangerous and sometimes fatal effects’, but left the search for a specific cause to medical practitioners who would be able to carry out analyses on individual cases as and when they occurred.51 The details of Bell’s paper, delivered over a month earlier on 5 February 1878, were published in the Observer on 16 March and were more comprehensive than

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the records kept by the Medico-Chirurgical Society itself. According to the Observer, Bell’s theory was ‘that the disease is septicaemia, caused by the inhalation of a septic poison (of germs, bacteria, or other living organism)’.52 The press also felt that this new understanding of the disease meant that the ‘poisonous germs may be easily and certainly removed without injury to the materials by exposing them for a sufficient time to air, water, heat, or other disinfecting agent’, suggesting that woolsorters’ disease was preventable by relatively simple means.53 Bell himself wrote to the Observer later in 1878 in the wake of another fatal case, and reiterated his ideas on how the condition might be prevented.54 Interestingly, his own handwritten note on a newspaper cutting of the letter indicates that ‘at this time I [Bell] had not found the bacillus anth[racis] in the blood and thought its [woolsorters’ disease] occurrence due to a specific septicaemia’.55 This clearly indicates that it was not until later in that year that Bell established to his satisfaction what was causing the condition, and the advice that he offered to sorters, manufacturers and other interested parties was based upon the theory of causation that he presented to the Medico-Chirurgical Society: a septic poison rather than an organism. In light of this, the Daily Telegraph noted, in its leading article the following day, that if these simple measures (Bell recommended passing suspected wools through hot water) were enough to prevent the disease from occurring, ‘every death which takes place from this form of disease must be attributable to criminal carelessness on the part of some one’.56 Satire and humour, touched at in the Observer, had a more prominent place in other publications, such as the Yorkshireman.57 This relatively cheap, weekly periodical was ‘[o]ne of the most successful humorous journals published in the provinces – certainly the most successful in the North of England … [A]n organ of social criticism and comment on current events’.58 An example of the approach that the Yorkshireman took in addressing the issue of woolsorters’ disease came on 16 March 1878 – only just over a fortnight after the topic emerged in the Observer and Daily Telegraph. ‘The Woolsorters’ Lay’, an eleven-stanza piece, touched upon a wide range of issues surrounding the debate on woolsorters’ disease, including employers’ responsibility, the use of fans to remove dust, comments by Butterfield and the economic necessity of retaining employment. The visual construction of woolsorters’ disease also had a place in the Yorkshireman and in the wider cultural life of Yorkshire (see Figure 2.1). In the image, ‘Death in the Woolpack’, a hooded figure – clearly representing the deadly condition – emerges from a bale of wool to strike down the unsuspecting woolsorter, who is going innocently about his work. The two figures flanking the unseen assassin – ‘poison’ to the left and ‘fever’ to the right – show the most prominent possible cause and symptom associated with the condition. The caption below the image – ‘A Subject for a New Fresco in the Bradford Town Hall’ – indicates the centrality of the problem as perceived by the general public; here was a con-

I\'OOLPACR. I\'OOLPACR.

THE

DEATH IN THE I\'OOLPACR. (I S r B J E C T F O R

A B E W FEGSCO l X T E E BRADFORD TOWii H A L L . )

Figure 2.1: ‘Death in the Woolpack: A Subject for a New Fresco in the Bradford Town Hall’. Image reproduced from the Yorkshireman (1878), Papers on Anthrax, University of Bradford, GB 0532 ANT; with permission from Special Collections, University of Bradford.

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dition that was being represented and viewed as a very significant episode in the continuing development of Bradford’s worsted trade (and the region’s economy in general).59 The mere fact that the cloaked figure holds further arrows in his left hand indicated that the particular death depicted here was not simply a one-off ; it was an affliction that would certainly take other victims if effective measures were not taken. The origins of the disease – with the menace clearly emerging from the bales of wool – were unmistakable in this particular illustration, demonstrating in no uncertain terms the generalized belief among the public that this was where the causative agent or substance resided. The idea that a death from woolsorters’ disease was a virtually instantaneous one is also strongly suggested by this image, with the sorter being upright and healthy one moment and perishing the next, oblivious to the danger. A sorter who met such an end was Samuel Firth, and his death in May 1880 marked the beginning of a new stage in Bradfordian public discourse, which not only incorporated Bell’s new theory but also increased calls for manufacturers and overseers to be held responsible for cases.

The Death of Samuel Firth Reporting on woolsorters’ disease followed a specific pattern over subsequent years, with increased press activity coinciding with the occurrence of not only medical and legal developments but also individual cases of the condition. The death of Samuel Firth, a woolsorter based at Messrs Mitchell and Shepherd in Bradford, on 5 May 1880 was the first instance where the employers themselves were formally blamed, and John Henry Bell was again at the centre of these discussions. Bell noted on the death certificate that Firth had died from ‘woolsorters’ disease or splenic fever’, but he also appended the following remark: ‘from his employers’ neglect in not having the mohair he was sorting disinfected beforehand’.60 Firth, described as being ‘a strong, healthy, robust man’, had been engaged in sorting ‘what is known as Cape and “average” mohair’, and had been a woolsorter for ‘upwards of twenty years’.61 The wool on which he was working had ‘not been submitted to any process of disinfection or washing’, and ‘some of the sheets threw off a strong odour … in fact it was stated to be extremely obnoxious’.62 Bell placed the blame for the death at the door of Firth’s employers, owing to the lack of observance of these safety measures. By this time, Bell had already made public his revised theory on what caused woolsorters’ disease. The absence of any discussion concerning the presence or absence of Bacillus anthracis in this case thus illustrated a major shift in the significance of different aspects of the disease. In the case of Firth, the principal interest lay in who was responsible for the occurrence of the disease, rather than with the biological details of the condition itself. The Daily Telegraph, although it professed impartiality on the matter, nonetheless did not shirk from asserting that there were ‘no grounds for the assertion that Firth’s death was due to the

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neglect of his employers’.63 Indeed, the paper and public appeared to be far more concerned about what might constitute an ‘accident’, with the Daily Telegraph likening cases of woolsorters’ disease to instances of men being urged up dangerous scaffolding by their employers.64 Another dimension to the debate over this particular case can be seen from the coverage in the Observer, which chose to focus its attentions on more medical matters. It was noted that ‘the simple passing of dangerous wools through water has been proved to be altogether ineffectual in destroying the deadly germs which lurk in them and kill the unfortunate manipulator’.65 The disease, it was suggested, came not simply from ‘a bad smell; it comes from living parasitical germs, bred of corruption’, implying that the organisms responsible for the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease arose during the course of putrefaction.66 The strong echoes of Bell’s presentation to the Medico-Chirurgical Society given some months earlier suggest that although there was no formal publication of the contents of this paper (as had been the case two years earlier in 1878), the notion that woolsorters’ disease was a discrete condition in and of itself, caused by a specific germ, had moved into the public domain. This particular understanding was further highlighted by Bell’s comments to the resulting inquest, where he noted that: [a]s the illness became worse, the organisms [present in the blood] increased in number, so that death must ultimately ensure. The organisms were not the result of decomposition, but were produced in the blood by the deleterious material inhaled into the system. Sometimes the organisms were of animal origin, and sometimes of vegetable origins. The woolsorters’ disease might be of two kinds – one produced by animal decomposition, and the other from fleeces of animals which had died from that particular disease (anthrax).67

Here, Bell presented an understanding of the disease that differed very substantially from his earlier assertions that the Bacillus anthracis was the sole cause of woolsorters’ disease. Although he continued to associate the condition with anthrax, the picture of the germ theory of disease on which the above position was based was far more ambiguous, and allowed for lively discussion during the course of coroners’ proceedings. The arena of the public inquest – the official in this case being J. G. Hutchinson – saw ‘expert’ testimonies, such as that of Dr Bell, being used alongside those of other employees in the wool industry. In the case of the Firth inquest, for example, three woolsorters – Marshall Whittaker, Robert Huddlestone and Andrew Sutcliffe – all representing different firms, gave evidence as to the suspected danger of different classes of wool, the use of safety measures such as disinfection of fleeces, and their experiences of the health of their co-workers. Whittaker, for example, had been ‘attacked … in one of his fingers, and his right hand was corrupted … He attributed his illness to something

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connected with the Van mohair’.68 Full details of the methods by which the supposedly offending material was imported also formed a significant portion of the investigations.69 How much credence was given to these accounts is unclear, but the fact that these testimonies were reported in full, including cross-examination by the Town Clerk, indicates that the individual experiences of woolsorters became freely available to the public during such inquests. Local newspapers were instrumental in disseminating this information to a still wider audience. An indication of public opinion on the issue of Firth’s death can be gleaned from the correspondence columns of the Observer and Daily Telegraph. Letters published in the days after the announcement of Firth’s death, all published anonymously, show that the details of the disease itself were of minor importance when compared to the perceived suffering of the woolsorters. ‘B’ argued that ‘so long as men cost nothing, and horses cost money, the horses will be better cared for than the men’, suggesting that the status of woolsorters (and workers in general) prevented them from being protected in their work.70 Others sought clarification of the current methods of cleansing the wool and to draw attention to the broad spectrum of individuals who suffered from the condition: ‘the young, middle-aged, and old, the strong and weakly, the steady and the drinking man, are all to be found among its victims’.71 Discussion about the role of the employer in protecting the workers and the provenance of the wools supposedly responsible for the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease dominated further discussion within the press.72 A particularly notable manifestation of the issue of blame, which dominated the proceedings of the inquiry into Samuel Firth’s death, came with the impassioned cross-examination of Bell by Major Shepherd, of Firth’s former employers, Mitchell and Shepherd. Shepherd argued at length that Bell, as a result of his own research into the condition, was somehow predisposed to arrive at a diagnosis of woolsorters’ disease. Bell’s robust defence of his diagnosis was sufficient to ensure that the jury’s final verdict read as follows: ‘That Samuel Firth died from blood-poisoning, accidentally resulting from his employment as a woolsorter, while engaged in sorting Cape mohair for his employers, Messrs Mitchell and Shepherd’.73 As well as factual reporting of the Bell–Shepherd debate, the Yorkshireman noted that ‘[i]t was a really splendid conflict between witness and cross-examiner, most interesting to the spectators, especially to those of them who were in immediate danger of being poisoned by unwashed Van [mohair] … I think that the general opinion would be that the Caledonian calmth [sic] of Dr Bell was too much for the Major’.74 As a result of the inquest into the death of Samuel Firth, the foreman of the jury, William Johnson, issued a ‘presentment … containing recommendations’ for preventative measures to be adopted when sorting all classes of wool.75 These included steeping bales in hot water before opening, repeated washing following the opening of bales, adequate ventilation for sorting rooms, lime washing ‘with

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lime, mixed with carbolic acid’ of the walls every six months, and forbidding the eating of meals in sorting rooms. The broad range of wools that were considered dangerous included ‘Van mohair, Cape hair, Persian wools, and all dry Eastern wools and hair’.76 These recommendations were, however, voluntary, and represented nothing more binding than a code of practice that employers were encouraged to follow. There was thus no legal obligation on their part to implement these preventative measures. It is important to note that at this point during the development of understandings of woolsorters’ disease, the condition in question was one that solely affected the lungs. The connection between external ‘anthraxes’ (which were regarded as carbuncles, arising independently of woolsorters’ disease) and the internal malady affecting woolsorters had not yet been made. In this spirit, the Observer noted that ‘[w]oolsorters’ disease, as we have known it in Bradford, is mainly a lung disease’.77 The external form of the disease, with its clearly observable symptoms on the skin (most often occurring on exposed parts of the skin such as the neck and hands), did not therefore form part of the public discussion of woolsorters’ disease. However, with generalized public worries concerning the disease increasing, the move of the condition from humans to animals attracted considerable attention.

Anthrax Emerges ‘Remarkable Forms of Woolsorters’ Disease’ Just two months after the death of Samuel Firth – arguably the biggest case of its kind to date – a development in the scope of woolsorters’ disease took place that would prove to be pivotal in concretizing the links between that particular condition and anthrax in animals. On 2 July 1880 all three of Bradford’s major newspapers – the Observer, Daily Telegraph and Chronicle and Mail – reported the occurrence of an apparent case of woolsorters’ disease in livestock at a farm near Harden Grange.78 As the Observer noted on the following day, ‘[t]he idea that a cow may die of woolsorters’ disease is likely, by its grotesqueness, to cause anyone hearing of it for the first time to smile’; yet it was acknowledged that as a result of the safety measures (principally washing of the wool) recently suggested, ‘[t]he same means which ensured the safety of the woolsorter carried death to the animal outside’.79 Here ‘several cattle and sheep … died from a disease, which on examination has been found to be produced by the same cause as that which produces the “woolsorters’ disease”’. The water used to wash wool at various woolsorting establishments had evidently been allowed to run off onto pastures where the affected animals grazed, thereby setting up the disease. John Henry Bell, despite being a medical rather than veterinary practitioner, attended

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the autopsy of a heifer that had been taken by the condition.80 Bell would go on to publish a paper later the same year that dealt with anthrax in both animals and man, including some of the details of the investigations conducted into the cases mentioned in the local press.81 Despite the initial surprise expressed at the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease among animals in the locality, subsequent reporting of such cases melded together incidents among both men and beasts. When a further ‘fine heifer’ was lost by Mr Dunlop at his farm, details of two other suspected cases – one in a dog, another in a ‘lad employed at Messrs Watmuff ’s mill’ – appeared within the same article.82 In the case of this particular animal, ‘Drs Bell and Roberts, and Mr Collins, [a] veterinary surgeon’ conducted the post-mortem and, significantly, ‘[p]ortions of the interior of the carcase’ were sent for to Professor William Smith Greenfield, of the London-based Brown Animal Sanatory Institute, for bacteriological analysis.83 Indeed, Greenfield would take an active role in investigating cases occurring in animals in the Bradford district, sending ‘three cows to graze’ on the farms where suspected instances of the disease had been recorded. He hoped in this way to have controlled subjects to analyse in order to determine more precisely what the cause of death might be.84 Further consideration of the relationship between anthrax and woolsorters’ disease in animals came with a report in the Observer of the disease being spread by earthworms, ‘the agents of conveyance’ of the bacteria from buried carcases to the surface. In response to the findings of this particular investigation, which had been conducted by a certain M. Pasteur, it was recommended that animals which had ‘died of this disease should not be buried in fields devoted to crops or pasturage, but … in sandy, calcareous ground, poor and dry – unsuitable, in a word, for worms’.85 The reports of the condition in local newspapers in this period also demonstrate that, far from Bell being the sole investigator in the locality (as might be supposed by the frequency of his publications in the medical press), others were also engaged in elucidating the cause(s), effects and treatments of woolsorters’ disease. Indeed, an article in the Bradford Chronicle and Mail noted that ‘the public have become much enlightened as to the cause of the malady’, due to the endeavours of Drs Lodge, Jr, Rabagliati and others. Curiously, there was no mention on this occasion of the work of Bell.86 The fact that animals could now also contract woolsorters’ disease also provided material for comic interpretations of events, with an extract – most probably from the Yorkshireman – noting that although there are ‘plenty of them [working men] and to spare [sic], but Beef must be protected come what will!’87 Although the jesting manner of this piece comes across strongly, the attitude that men were expendable and cheap, whereas animals were indispensable and expensive, was hinted at by critics of the employers and workmen alike. As the Bradford Observer noted in 1881: ‘Men must work, and women must weep / Hands are plentiful, and lives are cheap’.88

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Woolsorters’ Disease Publicly, Anthrax Professionally? By the close of 1881, the medical community (particularly those in Bradford) had broadly acknowledged that ‘woolsorters’ disease was a form of constitutional [inhalation] anthrax’, a process of recognition that Bell actively sought to drive.89 The local press also acknowledged that there was overlap in terms of the causative organism – the Bacillus anthracis – yet referred resolutely to the condition as woolsorters’ disease rather than anthrax. As the Bradford Observer noted: ‘the peculiar form of disease … is popularly and significantly termed “woolsorters’ disease”’.90 Thus, although it was widely acknowledged that there was the same underlying cause to both anthrax in animals and woolsorters’ disease in man, the latter label continued to hold sway in the public domain. ‘Woolsorters’ disease’ itself was a term which, by the early 1880s, had become commonplace in Bradford, and this reluctance to adopt a new name for the condition can partly be explained by the fact that this original term had become ingrained within the local discourse surrounding the health of workers in the wool industry. It would persist in this vein until virtually the turn of the century; cases throughout 1896, for example, were referred to almost exclusively as instances of woolsorters’ disease rather than anthrax.91 Even in a case as late as 1897, the medical practitioner performing the post-mortem, Dr Rutherford (who had done so ‘in conjunction with Dr Bell’), stated that ‘[D]eath was due to what was commonly called woolsorters’ disease’.92 From around 1897 onwards, however, there was a gradual shift occurred in the terms used to describe the condition. Initially, headlines in the local press retained the label of ‘woolsorters’ disease’, but this term became superseded in the text of articles by ‘anthrax’.93 This change was neither instantaneous nor complete, however; this period can be characterized by the two names being used relatively interchangeably. During the 1897 proceedings of an inquest into the death of Jonas Rushworth, a woolsorter at Black Dike Mills, Queensbury, for example, the cause of his death was given as being ‘blood poisoning from anthrax bacillus, known as woolsorter’s disease’.94 Just eight days earlier, the Times had run a leading article reporting on the then-current efforts to improve health in so-called ‘dangerous occupations’, which had recently been extended to include woolsorting. In that particular article, the principal focus was on anthrax, which was ‘sometimes spoken of as the woolsorters’ disease’, identifying a significant difference between the situation in the West Riding and elsewhere; nationally, ‘anthrax’ was the dominant term, whereas, locally, ‘woolsorters’ disease’ remained the most easily recognizable indicator of the illness.95 A particularly striking instance of the different meanings that woolsorters’ disease and anthrax had at this time can be seen from the death of Joseph Case, a woolcomber employed in Bingley. This case – which was ultimately found by the coroner to be a death ‘from natural causes’ – was presented and understood by the public as one of suspected woolsorters’ disease.96 When Bell wrote to the press in order to protest that the verdict delivered by the coroner was untrust-

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worthy, given that ‘the negative results of cultivations, as reported, are not of the slightest value as indicating that the deceased did not die from anthrax’, his letter was entitled ‘The Suspected Case of Woolsorters’ Disease at Bingley’ – despite the fact that Bell referred to the condition as ‘anthrax’ throughout.97 To reinforce the flexibility that these two terms had for the public of Bradford, a case in December 1898 drew the use of ‘anthrax’ in a headline for the first time.98 The first line of this particular article read as follows: ‘The circumstances of what appears to be a most distressing case of woolsorters’ disease were investigated to-day at the Royal Hotel, Denholme, before Mr J. E. Hill (deputy coroner for the Halifax district)’.99 These two cases speak for themselves in confirming the interchangeability of the descriptions of this condition as either ‘anthrax’ or ‘woolsorters’ disease’ for the West Yorkshire public. That is not to say, of course, that they both referred to the same condition. Woolsorters’ disease held far more deeply rooted cultural resonances, and – particularly given the contents of the Workmen’s Compensation Act that came into force in 1897 – embodied the struggle of skilled working men for safer working conditions. Woolsorters’ disease was the human manifestation of an infection with the germs of anthrax. Anthrax itself, meanwhile, remained more strongly linked with the idea of the fleeces and wools themselves. For the woolworker, the bales of wool contained ‘anthrax’ (whether it be the germs of that disease or the disease itself ), and this was liable to produce the infection of woolsorters’ disease. Far from being exclusively a lung condition, which it had been in the past, the scope of woolsorters’ disease itself had expanded. It is clear that by the turn of the twentieth century, there were two forms of woolsorters’ disease: external and internal. H. Angus, who conducted a post-mortem in the case of John Walsh in 1899, remarked that ‘in the external form of woolsorter’s disease the bacilli were conveyed into the body through an injury to the skin and not through the lungs, as in the internal type’.100 In the same testimony, Angus referred to both ‘the bacilli of anthrax’ and ‘anthrax of the external form’, again highlighting the fluid use of these two terms. The cultural baggage that was attached to woolsorters’ disease gradually migrated to its sister condition, however. Synonymous use of the two terms in the press demonstrates this shift, and during the early years of the twentieth century ‘anthrax’ came to dominate.

Culpable and Criminal [T]he Coroner said it seemed to him that Mr. Ackroyd had done all that he could be required to do, and possibly more, and there could be no blame attached to him.101

With new legislation came new responsibility for the employers. Whereas the Bradford Rules of 1884, which expanded upon the earlier preventative measures stipulated following the death of Samuel Firth three years earlier, remained as a

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code of conduct, the provisions of the Workmen’s Compensation Act (1897) made the bulk of these voluntary regulations legally enforceable. Inquests into individual cases had almost exclusively exonerated the employers of any blame for the deaths, yet these new legislative powers allowed for stricter demands to be placed on manufacturers. As a result of this, establishing whether the individuals who perished did so as a result of anthrax or woolsorters’ disease became a secondary concern. More pressing was whether the employers of these unfortunates were culpably and/or criminally negligent. Although medical testimony was still a central element of inquiries, more reliable diagnostic methods such as cultivating the bacilli, rather than inoculating test animals, ensured that establishing the cause of death in these cases became a simpler and less controversial procedure.102 Independently of the inquests, there emerged a new type of reporting on woolsorting: discussion on the implementation of regulations. These included parliamentary debates on the issue, reports of cases brought before magistrates and deputations made on behalf of employees.103 The question also arose as to whether infections with anthrax could be regarded as ‘accidents’. This was raised principally by employers attempting to establish that they could not be held responsible for individual cases, as the contraction of disease occurred purely by chance.104 The debate concerning the accidental occurrence of anthrax would continue for some years to come: individual cases were constantly subjected to scrutiny in this respect.105 It was during the course of this particular debate that anthrax was marked out as being different ‘from ordinary infectious diseases, such as scarlet fever, in being associated with a particular employment, and differs even from lead-poisoning, which may occur to persons who do not work with lead’.106 It is reasonable to infer, therefore, that anthrax was regarded as a condition to which only a very select portion of society – those working in the wool industry and other kindred trades – was exposed. Claims against employers were not simply limited to issues of compensation. During the summer of 1901 the case of John Summergill, a card-jobber who had died of suspected anthrax on 31 May, was brought before the Bradford City coroner, J. G. Hutchinson. During the inquest that followed, the jury found that ‘death was due to anthrax, or woolsorter’s disease’ and ‘that Mr. Smith [Summergill’s manager], or his superiors, are responsible for the death of the deceased’.107 Smith was formally charged with manslaughter, but acquitted on 17 August at Bradford City Police Court. Nevertheless, the firm that employed both Smith and Summergill was ordered to pay out £50 in compensation to the deceased’s widow, in addition to £3 9s. in costs.108 The medical details of this particular case – such as the course of the disease – were limited to a brief description of the duration of the condition and a statement that anthrax bacilli had been discovered in, and cultured from, fluids taken from the patient.109 Claims for compensation would come to dominate the press coverage of anthrax cases over the following years.110

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Although there was a general feeling of optimism surrounding the implementation of regulations which ensured that employers and overseers were held to account when they were found to be negligent, there was also significant disenchantment concerning the fate of livestock. In 1904, as far as the incidence of anthrax in farm animals was concerned, ‘it cannot be said that much progress has been made towards the extinction of the disease’.111 Despite John Henry Bell’s prophetic announcement in 1881 that many of those alive today ‘would live to see the time when the disease as it affected woolsorters would be extinct’, no non-surgical treatments for external anthrax emerged until the year of his own death.112 The appearance in 1905 of the Italian preparation Sclavo’s serum therefore caused a significant stir within Bradford.113 Although initial failures of the serum to cause improvement in patients were put down to the delay between the onset of symptoms and consultation with a medical practitioner, successful instances of the serum’s use were widely reported.114 With the rise of proceedings attempting to secure compensation for the families of those who died from anthrax came a change in the role of the local medical practitioner. While those offering evidence in the 1880s and 1890s had routinely reported detailed results of post-mortem analyses in order to determine for certain whether the condition was anthrax, the focus now moved to establishing whether the disease came about as a result of employers’ non-adherence to safety regulations. Dr Frederick William Eurich, recently installed as bacteriologist to the AIB, was one of the key figures at these proceedings.115 The public role of Eurich, therefore, was in distinct contrast from his more secluded position as a salaried bacteriologist. The pages of the local press also reveal criticisms of Eurich made by fellow members of the AIB, which came in addition to the arguments levelled against him by Frederick Jowett MP. T. Grundy, secretary to the National Union of Woolsorters and a member of the Board from its inception in 1905, criticized a lecture given by Eurich before the Bradford Scientific Association in early March of the following year. Grundy objected to the impression conveyed by Eurich: that ‘anthrax victims are all more or less alcoholics’.116 Eurich himself responded at length the following day, and argued that, while he did not consider all sufferers to be alcoholics, there was a strong connection between a propensity to heavy drinking and the occurrence of infectious disease.117 It is interesting to note that in the course of his letter, Eurich confessed that he had ‘made it a rule for myself not to discuss medical subjects in the public Press’.118 For the general public, therefore, virtually the sole sources of information concerning Eurich’s position on anthrax available were the reports of inquests, where his testimony frequently appeared. This further emphasizes the gulf between professional and public understandings of the disease; most ordinary Bradfordians would have no intellectual access to the laboratory-based work that he was carrying out on behalf of the AIB.

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‘The Anthrax Peril’ The year in which the highest number of fatalities from anthrax occurred during the first two decades of the twentieth century, 1906, also witnessed the rise of anthrax’s representation as a perilous disease. The emergence of headlines such as ‘The Anthrax Peril’, ‘Bradford Health Committee and the Anthrax Danger’ and ‘The Anthrax Danger’ demonstrates the notion of fear that the disease still held, despite the perception that the bacillus had been ‘tracked to its lair’ over twenty years earlier.119 This perception would continue through the ensuing decade, with even the brief annual updates of the work being conducted by Eurich for the AIB being met with general cynicism.120 A lengthy article highlighting the most significant developments over the first five years of the Board’s work appeared in 1911, however. Here the work of the Board was robustly defended by the Yorkshire Observer, placing particular emphasis on the ‘superlative danger of bloodstains’, which had been identified in the Annual Report of 1910.121 The theme of danger continued unabated through the continued operation of the AIB. In 1919, for example, shortly after the Board had ceased its operations, a case of anthrax in Tom Ellis, a pupil at the Dewsbury Wheelwright Grammar School, was heralded with the headline: ‘Deadly Anthrax’. The particularly tragic case, in which Ellis had been playing football with two cousins, one of whom worked for a blanket firm, the other with a woollen manufacturing firm, received only very minor coverage in the Bradford Daily Telegraph and was ignored entirely by the Yorkshire Observer.122 This period closed with curiously detached reporting of the move towards the implementation of the Anthrax Prevention Act (1919). The matter-of-fact statements in the Daily Telegraph came in response to the Bill’s second reading in the House of Commons, and later the paper commented that some £52,000 would be spent on the new disinfection station at Liverpool.123 By the time that the station had been constructed and was brought into operation in July 1921, the term woolsorters’ disease had all but disappeared from local discourse on the subject. Nevertheless, anthrax did not constitute a direct replacement, as it described an illness that held a very different set of cultural connotations.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that the wider Bradford public understood anthrax and woolsorters’ disease in very different ways from how these were perceived by the medical profession, even if the term ‘woolsorters’ disease’ had itself originated in Bradford’s factories. Although individuals such as Samuel Lodge, Jr, John Henry Bell and Frederick Eurich engaged in discourse within the popular press, and had details of their contributions to inquests and post-mortem examinations published, specific features of the disease – such as who might be to blame

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for the occurrence of the condition – did not cross from the public domain to the professional sphere. That is not to say, of course, that these were two exclusive arenas with a total lack of discourse across the boundaries between them. Eurich’s efforts to train woolsorters in recognizing blood stains in dark fleeces, for example, show that endeavours were made to disseminate the specialist knowledge constructed in the laboratory to a wider audience. Local newspapers played a key role in acting as both passive forums for the reporting of the details of individual cases and research, and active constructors and shapers of public opinion and understanding. While previous scholarship on the nature of anthrax and woolsorters’ disease has focused almost exclusively on specialist medical publications, this analysis of the public domain produces a much richer picture of how these two conditions were understood and regarded more generally. The transition from woolsorters’ disease to anthrax in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bradford was neither uniform nor complete. For a significant portion of the period in question, the two co-existed for the public of West Yorkshire, each with its own attached cultural significance. The medicalization of woolsorters’ disease did not remove the folk understanding surrounding the condition and, as was shown in Chapter 1, these folk understandings were to a large extent responsible for the direction of research taken by medical practitioners. Analysis of the public domain in Bradford also showed that anthrax and woolsorters’ disease were conditions that elicited fear among those engaged in the wool trade. The occurrence of isolated cases among those with only a tenuous connection to this industry (as well as the trade’s economic importance) ensured that the issue of woolsorters’ health remained a central local issue. The socio-economic life of Bradford therefore played a major role in determining the identity of and discussion surrounding both woolsorters’ disease and anthrax. Powerful ideas about the cause and progression of woolsorters’ disease were created in factories independently of specialist medical investigation, while newspapers allowed extensive input into complex medico-cultural debates from a number of social groups. Although there was significant attention paid to both woolsorters’ disease and anthrax in Bradford during this period, however, it was by no means a unique case. There were other locations within Britain, most notably Glasgow, Kidderminster and East Anglia, where anthrax was an issue of particular local significance in various different guises. It is to the differences and similarities between understandings and representations of the disease in these places that we turn in the next chapter.

3 BEYOND BRADFORD: ANTHRAX ACROSS BRITAIN

I shall state at once, and without discussion of the symptoms, appearances, &c. that all these cases were in my opinion but various forms of the disease known as Anthrax, Charbon, Milzbrand, Splenic Fever, Malignant Pustules, &c. &c.1

So wrote James Burn Russell, Glasgow’s first full-time Medical Officer of Health, in a supplement to the Report of the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board published in 1879. Russell, a great advocate of the cause of public health and sanitation, investigated suspicious deaths that occurred at the Adelphi Hair Factory, Glasgow, in 1878, and came to the conclusion that the causative organism was in fact Bacillus anthracis. At the same time, John Henry Bell was confidently asserting that a ‘septic poison’ was responsible for woolsorters’ disease in Bradford. Russell’s report – tucked away in an obscure publication – remained largely unknown to his fellow practitioners until at least April 1880, when he presented on the topic to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow, by which time Bell had already made the connection between woolsorters’ disease and anthrax.2 As we saw in earlier chapters, anthrax featured prominently in the public life of Bradford. However, cases of the disease were by no means limited to either the town or the wider environ of West Yorkshire. This chapter seeks to contrast the research cultures and public characterizations of woolsorters’ disease and anthrax in locations across Britain with those in Bradford, focusing primarily on Glasgow, Kidderminster and East Anglia. The former two were important manufacturing centres, while the latter was historically associated with the wool industry until it was surpassed by the more highly industrialized town of Bradford in the early nineteenth century. It is only in recent years that historians have been looking at anthrax in a geographically comparative way. Indeed, comparative research has shown that between 1900 and 1914, the lively and systematic medical investigations conducted in Bradford were the exception rather than the rule.3 For the majority of the rest of Britain, ‘[a]nthrax, except in Bradford, was not a major pre-occupation of Medical Officers of Health or other sanitary officials’, as ‘[t]hey had numerically far larger disease problems to deal with’.4 Susan D. Jones and Philip M. Teigen – 63 –

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offer a different interpretation. Using Secord’s model of ‘knowledge in transit’ and the case studies of Bradford, Glasgow and Walpole, Massachusetts, they assert that a stable, transnational network of intellectual and practical knowledge exchange existed between these nodes.5 Other histories of anthrax have largely neglected comparisons between different areas where anthrax-like diseases occurred. This chapter will identify the extent to which there existed commensurate understandings of anthrax and woolsorters’ disease in this period, with a particular focus on cases that were reported in the public domain. While Glasgow and Kidderminster paralleled Bradford’s industrial setting (anthrax occurred primarily as part of Glasgow’s horsehair industry and in Kidderminster’s carpet manufacture), the analysis of East Anglia demonstrates another context in which anthrax was encountered: the concurrent maintenance of agriculture and loss of industry. Only sporadic reference was made to cases of anthrax and woolsorters’ disease among animals in the case of Bradford, whereas the diseases’ incidence in herd animals (particularly heifers) was central to the discourse surrounding anthrax in rural communities. The chapter will consequently be divided into four sections, addressing Glasgow, Kidderminster, East Anglia and other localities respectively. There existed, as Jones and Teigen have argued, common grounds of knowledge between some of these districts about the biology of anthrax. However, this was tempered by very different cultural understandings of the disease in its many varied forms. Examining the impact of social factors on the understanding of these related diseases offers new insight into how the production and circulation of scientific and medical knowledge was a product of cultural as well as biological factors. This chapter therefore argues that there existed a wide variety of different understandings of anthrax throughout Britain, even after medical practitioners and non-professionals were largely agreed on a common cause. Much material will be taken from local newspapers and specialist medical publications. The comparisons between Glasgow, Kidderminster, East Anglia and Bradford demonstrate not only the variety of approaches to anthrax and woolsorters’ disease in Britain during this period, but also the importance of the social context in determining these disease identities and the wide geographical scope which research carried out in Bradford ultimately achieved.

Glasgow James Burn Russell (1837–1904) He was a great sanitarian, and his name will remain so as long as the science of public health continues to be studied in these realms.6

To this day Russell continues to be hailed in terms such as those expressed in his obituary in the BMJ quoted above, and he is widely regarded as one of the most successful public health officials of his generation. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reflects this status:

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by the time Russell left his post Glasgow was internationally renowned for its public health services; mortality had dropped from 29 to 21 per 1000 and was lower than that of Liverpool and Manchester. Deaths from tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases had declined more sharply than in the rest of Scotland and the city led the fight against childhood diseases.7

In addition to his lengthy tenure as Medical Officer of Health in Glasgow from 1872 to 1898, Russell published some eighty scientific papers and books, gave numerous talks to local and national intellectual societies, and acted as an agent for social reform in both Glasgow and Scotland more generally. However, as the BMJ noted upon his death, ‘it was as medical officer of health that his best work was done – the work which gained for him a wider than European reputation, and a recognized place among the leaders of sanitary advance’.8 Russell was a university-educated man of Congregationalist background, and his faith was clearly important to him throughout his career.9 The city with which he was associated for almost his entire career, Glasgow, was, like Bradford in this period, an important manufacturing centre. It was often referred to as the ‘second city of the Empire’, and imported materials continued to fuel the burgeoning cotton and shipbuilding industries during the nineteenth century. As was also the case in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the expansion of the city brought with it imports from an increasingly diverse range of territories. In addition to the more noteworthy trades previously mentioned, the horsehair industry thrived in Glasgow in the latter part of the nineteenth century, preparing a refined product for stuffing mattresses and pillows. Russell was well aware of the traditional poor health of workers in this particular industry – he was in a position to quote from Charles Turner Thackrah’s 1832 treatise on the relationship between employment and trade.10 In contrast to his favourable description of the atmosphere in which woolsorters worked in the early part of the nineteenth century, Thackrah was scornful in his critique of the conditions to which ‘Preparers or Dressers of Hair’ were exposed: men, women, or boys – are in an atmosphere of dust and stench, especially when employed on the foreign article … The complexion is soon rendered pale, the appetite reduced, the head affected with pain, respiration impeded, cough and expectoration established, the body emaciated. I scarcely need add, that life is sacrificed to a continuance of the employ … Few persons, indeed, are employed in the dressing of hair, and fewer are acquainted with their situation and suffering.11

The Adelphi Hair Factory occupied large, relatively new premises located on Govan Street, running along the south bank of the river Clyde, adjacent to some of the largest docks in Glasgow. Russell’s attention was drawn to the factory by a letter marked ‘Private’, which he received on 7 March 1878.12 According to the communication, three female operatives at the Adelphi had died after a short, unexplained illness – one on 1 March and two on 6 March. Although Russell was not able to observe the individuals prior to their death, he ordered

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a post-mortem examination of the one body yet to be interred, and compiled notes based on ‘all the information which could be obtained from every available source, as to the circumstances bearing upon the cases’.13 Russell was quick to commence his investigations: he secured the post-mortem referred to above on 8 March, the day after the deaths had first come to his attention.14 He published a report late the following year that was a curious hybrid of specialized bacteriological findings, lay evidence of symptoms collected mostly from the families of sufferers, and details of other (mostly non-fatal) cases that Russell himself encountered from the beginning of March. Russell not only carefully documented the particulars of cases and subsequent examinations, but he also gave an elaborate and detailed account of the history of anthrax as a (primarily agricultural) disease, covering French, German, American and British literature. Russell also re-examined deaths that had occurred at the Adelphi Hair Factory in earlier years, connecting three cases in particular with the presence of a specific type of hair in the factory. Although these took place between 1876 and 1877, he was able to rely on the ‘copious notes made by Dr [Hector C.] Cameron at the time’, and Russell recognized that all three had been involved in the manipulation of Russian hair shortly before falling ill.15 Nor was the investigation into mysterious deaths restricted to the Adelphi Factory; Russell also documented the details of further cases which had been brought to his attention at Messrs McRae, where he adduced that ‘“[r]aw Russian manes” were being manufactured at the time of each of these deaths’.16 Russell was struck in particular by three aspects relating to the cases that he investigated: firstly, the strong connection between the type of material being worked and the incidence of disease; and secondly, the seeming lack of connection between the general constitution of those affected and their propensity to develop the disease. In regard to the latter, while ‘E. S … was a very healthy, steady, wellbehaved woman, a good worker, and one of their oldest hands … H. J. O., on the other hand, was a delicate woman, regarded as consumptive’.17 Thirdly, in contrast to the good ventilation and high ceilings of the Adelphi Factory, Russell noted, the premises of Messrs McRae were ‘old and badly constructed. The machine shed especially is confined, and the arrangements for collecting the dust, and preventing it from impregnating the general atmosphere are rude and insufficient’.18 Russell also noted that the registered causes of death for these individuals were very varied, in much the same way as possible cases of woolsorters’ disease were in Bradford: The death of A. M. L. was registered as from an ‘unknown’ cause; that of M. McC as ‘sudden, supposed heart disease’; that of A. N. as ‘unknown’. Yet now that the facts are before us there can be no doubt whatever, that all three died from internal anthrax. There is therefore ground for suspicion that fatal cases may from time to time have been recorded on similar erroneous or imperfect information.19

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Unlike his contemporaries in Bradford, such as Bell, Russell was trying to fill an explanatory vacuum. While Bell and others were restricted by the powerful assumptions associated with the causes, spread and progression of woolsorters’ disease, Russell did not have to fit his investigations within such a culturally determined framework. This allowed him to bring in veterinary literature and therefore determine with far more certainty and authority that the disease in questions was in fact internal anthrax. Had such cases occurred in Bradford in this period, they would unquestionably have been labelled as incidences of woolsorters’ disease. The inclusion of veterinary material in Russell’s report furthered the conjunction of different understandings of anthrax. By explicitly linking the disease in animals and man, he was effectively breaking down the medical barrier separating these groups and hastening the unification of disparate understandings of anthrax. Russell’s report concluded with two principal suggestions for preventing further occurrence of anthrax within the Glasgow horsehair industry. Firstly, hair from infected animals should not be used in the industry, and secondly, ‘[f ]ailing such absolute safety as the exclusion of infected hair should provide’, all the material used should be subjected to mandatory disinfection. Drawing particularly on the experience of those working with horsehair in Massachusetts, Russell reluctantly accepted that these measures were impracticable. In their stead, he simply advised the cultivation of ‘generally good hygienic conditions in the work, and of special provision for the collection, expulsion and destruction of the dusty debris from the machine room’.20 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these broader safety measures bore a striking resemblance to those which had, at various times, found advocates among the Bradford medical profession. The wearing of respirators (dismissed by Russell, as ‘workpeople will not use this simple precaution’), the covering of exposed areas of skin, abstention from eating or drinking in rooms where machines were located, and informing workers of the ‘risk attendant upon their employment’ were all put forward in concluding his report.21 Russell’s findings were not published until at least eighteen months after his attention had first been drawn to the subject, and it is unlikely that they were widely read until a significant time thereafter. The first reference to this work in the BMJ, for example, did not come until May 1880.22 The article, which noted that Russell’s work threw ‘a flood of light on occurrences of the disease’, entered into lengthy discussion on the investigations of several writers, including Bell, Russell, Ludwig Hirt and Maximilian Chelius, placing Russell’s investigations into the same context as these other researches.23 The Glasgow man did not enter into discussion in the press concerning his investigation, however, and his publishing record indicates that he strongly favoured disseminating his work through Scottish-based journals.24 This seeming reluctance to publish in the primarily London-based medical press can perhaps been seen as a sign of Russell’s lifelong discontent with what he perceived to be the poor state of healthcare leg-

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islation for Scotland. Indeed, in an address to the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, held at Toronto in 1886, Russell noted that ‘while England, and even Ireland, have frequently since that date [1866] had their [Public Health] acts extended, amended, and consolidated, we in Scotland have remained twenty years behind’.25 To his report, Russell appended a brief postscript, dated 11 September 1879, which alluded to further cases that had come to light, the details of which appeared in the issue of the Glasgow Medical Journal for that same month. Although these had come ‘under the care of Dr McCall Anderson’, they were written up for publication by William G. Dun, then an MD student at Glasgow University.26 These contained merely clinical descriptions of the two cases (sisters employed at an ‘airy and well ventilated’ establishment), yet it is instructive that ‘numerous motionless rod-like bodies were found in the preserved specimens [of blood]’ and no mention was made of Bacillus anthracis. Dun’s completed thesis – entitled Malignant Pustule in Anthrax – came the following year, and offers a more complete insight into the Glasgow research culture surrounding anthrax after the earlier work of Russell. Before considering the work of Dun, however, it is instructive to note the comparisons between Russell and his counterpart in Bradford, John Henry Bell.

Bell and Russell Compared The two figures of Russell in Glasgow and Bell in Bradford were the central figures investigating the diseases in their particular districts. A notable contrast between the observations undertaken by Russell and by Bell can be seen in their attitudes towards the use of microscopy in diagnosis. While Bell was confident in identifying Bacillus anthracis as the causative organism in 1880 without having observed it in the blood of those suspected of having the disease, Russell noted that ‘[t]hese organisms were actually observed in the blood of M.D. [an individual suspected of having the disease], when examined microscopically’.27 Russell’s report also contained numerous references to Continental literature on both the organism and anthrax more generally, citing descriptions of the disease by Patissier, Vernois and Heusinger among others, while Bell himself did not refer to any of these published accounts of the condition. While Bell appeared to be unaware of the precedent set by Russell in the latter’s investigations, Russell himself was clearly alive to the occurrence of similar diseases in other areas. Although it has been noted that Russell suggested a possible connection between woolsorters’ disease and anthrax, this arose not during the course of his original report – as suggested by Jones and Teigen – but rather in a paper delivered to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow on 28 April 1880.28 This suggested connection from Russell thus came almost three months after Bell had delivered his paper to the Bradford Medico-Chirurgical Society,

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asserting the causal connection between the presence of Bacillus anthracis and woolsorters’ disease. It is thus perhaps not surprising that Bell was unaware of Russell’s investigations at the time.29 In contrast to the earlier attempts in Bradford to encourage workmen to wear respirators in order to prevent the inhalation of irritants, Russell acknowledged: ‘[t]he laying aside of respirators on every convenient opportunity, like the unlocking of Davy lamps, would undoubtedly be practised’.30 There was a strong similarity between the preventative measures suggested by Russell and Bell, and both recommended the improvement of general factory conditions as the most practical method of ensuring the safety of employees. The principal difference, however, lay in the fact that Russian horsehair – vilified as the harbinger of the Bacillus anthracis by Russell – was in fact banned from being used in the Glasgow trade.31 The material was not central to the industry, as was the case with Van mohair in Bradford. An example that puts this contrast in perspective was the occurrence of a case of anthrax in Bradford that had been contracted as a result of ‘manipulating Russian camel-hair’ in 1906.32 These two raw materials – Russian hair and Van mohair – both achieved notoriety as substances posing a risk to the health of workers, but the prevalence of the latter (and its associated economic importance) in the West Riding ensured that cases of anthrax occurred for years to come.

‘Quite a Number of Names’ Although Russell has been represented as Glasgow’s principal anthrax investigator in this period, he was certainly not alone in taking an interest in this particular question. Indeed, before Russell’s attention had even been attracted by the letter that he received in March 1878, another medical practitioner (albeit in training) was encountering the disease first-hand at the city’s Western Infirmary. Little is known about the life of William G. Dun, and his name is not to be found in any of the secondary literature addressing either anthrax or health in Glasgow in this period. He did, however, have an important connection with a prominent medical man in the city. He was clearly well acquainted with (later Sir) Thomas McCall Anderson, and had privileged access to the latter’s notes on cases of suspected anthrax in 1879. At that time, McCall Anderson held the Chair in Clinical Medicine at Glasgow University – a position he had occupied since its inception in 1874 – and Dun would later become one of his assistants.33 Dun’s association with McCall Anderson had a perceptible impact on the way in which he approached his work on cases of malignant pustule. The latter’s strong emphasis on the importance of clinical symptoms rather than microscopical analysis in arriving at a diagnosis is evident in Dun’s own research. Malignant Pustule in Anthrax is a thirty-seven-page text that makes extensive use of Russell’s report in determining the nature of the disease itself, while also including some

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important independent observations. Chief among these was Dun’s acknowledgement of the tangled web of names often ascribed to the condition caused by the Bacillus anthracis. As he wrote: [i]t is a pity that the nomenclature of this disease should be so confused, and it appears to me it would be much better to abandon the use of all other terms, and to adopt that of anthrax alone, restricting it to the very malignant disease in which the bacterium … is present, either in the local lesion, or in the blood and serous exudations.34

The names considered by Dun, however, did not encompass the term ‘woolsorters’ disease’, which had by mid-1880 become established in both medical and nonmedical literature as the term by which the disease was known in Bradford. Indeed, although he acknowledged that ‘workers in hair and wool’ were chief among the sufferers (in addition to ‘shepherds, farriers [and] tanners’), Dun did not otherwise mention any trade apart from the horsehair industry.35 This focus can clearly be explained by the prevalence of that particular trade in Glasgow and the fact that all the cases that Dun encountered were consequently as a result of that employment, but it is nevertheless surprising that woolsorters did not feature. Dun included work by Pollender, Trousseau, Bollinger, Reydellet and Rayer (although not mentioning specific texts) in his thesis, all of whom had themselves observed the occurrence of anthrax in those working in the hair industry and remarked on the clinical progression of the disease.36 In addition to the clinical accounts of cases, Dun used these Continental (almost exclusively French) writers to enter into a discussion on the nature of the disease itself. However, while he acknowledged that ‘the diagnostic value of the bacilli is of the greatest practical importance’, Dun was apparently not convinced of the necessarily causative role of the Bacillus anthracis in the case of malignant pustules.37 The concluding pages of the thesis elaborated upon treatments which ‘to ignorant bystanders may seem too energetic’. Dun recommended ‘the application of strong caustics to the pustule, such as concentrated carbolic acid, caustic potash, nitric acid &c’, and closed by endorsing Russell’s proposed preventative measures.38 Even in a purely medical treatise, written by an individual with no formal position with respect to public health, therefore, the crux of the matter lay in how the condition might be prevented rather than its underlying cause. Although both Dun and Russell carried out extensive investigations into the occurrence of anthrax among workers in Glasgow, however, the local press did not take such an active interest in the disease in this context. We move now to examine how ideas about anthrax were presented to the Glasgow public. In contrast to the intensive debate that accompanied cases in Bradford, Glaswegians were primarily interested in the disease as it occurred in animals.

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The Glasgow Press and Anthrax Some twenty years ago, when artisans engaged in woollen or worsted mills were attacked by infectious sickness, their malady was spoken of as woolsorters’ disease.39

With the sudden and unexpected death of several young, female workers in such a short space of time, it might be supposed that the widely circulated local newspaper the Glasgow Herald would have reported the incidents as a matter of urgency. However, the first reference made by this long-running daily periodical to the cases investigated by Dr Russell did not arrive until almost twenty years later, on 5 July 1897. The context in which the issue was brought into the press was that of the publication in that year of the findings of a Home Office Departmental Committee of Investigation into the problem of anthrax in industry. Recommendations made many years previously by Russell provided ‘valuable information’ for this committee, although the paper somewhat erroneously referred to his research as considering ‘the dangers of dust as a mechanical irritant’, rather than the risk posed by the anthrax bacillus.40 Interestingly, the paper noted that the 1878 cases constituted a ‘serious outbreak’, despite the fact that they received no press attention at the time.41 In the intervening period, then, what was the nature of press coverage of this disease? The highly industrialized manufacturing city of Glasgow – described by Jones and Teigen as the site of a ‘significant Anglo-American outbreak of industrial anthrax’ – might in the first instance seem likely to devote a large number of column inches to the discussion of anthrax as an industrial disease. However, quite the reverse is in fact observed. In marked contrast to the intensive debate and reporting of industrial anthrax and woolsorters’ disease present in Bradford throughout the period between 1878 and 1900, coverage in the Glasgow Herald centred almost entirely on cases of anthrax in animals that occurred across Scotland as a whole. In 1880, for example – the year in which Russell presented an amended version of his report to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow – the only mention of anthrax in the Glasgow Herald came on 8 November, when a paper delivered to the East of Berwickshire Agricultural Association on ‘Diseases of Cattle and their Importation’ by Professor George Fleming was summarized.42 Given the anticipated audience of this particular talk, it is hardly surprising that anthrax (also referred to by Fleming as splenic apoplexy) in humans received almost no attention. Russell’s second (and last) major formal involvement with anthrax came in January 1882, when he was called upon by Professor James McCall (distinct from McCall Anderson), the veterinary inspector to the Privy Council, to meet him regarding an outbreak of animal disease at a farm in Elderslie, a rural village some fifteen miles west of Glasgow. On this particular occasion Russell’s brief report, ultimately set before the Town Council, was published in full in the

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Glasgow Herald and gave an indication of the close relationship between veterinary practitioners and public health officials with respect to the problem of anthrax. In this particular case ‘the attention of the Glasgow public’ was ‘much attracted’ to the outbreak, largely because ‘the carcasses of the animals who died … because of this disease were subsequently sold in the Glasgow market’.43 Russell’s report was published in the Sanitary Journal, and the sale of the meat provoked interesting comment in that particular journal: An unintentional experiment, if we may use such a mild term, appears to have been recently made on the Glasgow public, by introducing into the dead meat market the carcases of 63 animals which were slaughtered in anticipation of natural death from ‘anthrax’, or ‘splenic apoplexy’.44

Although there were no subsequent cases of anthrax among humans as a result of this ‘experiment’, the close links between the disease in animals and man were clearly established in the minds of the Glasgow public. Indeed, this incident of meat being put up for sale while potentially harbouring anthrax bacilli came against the backdrop of far broader concerns about the integrity of foodstuffs in Glasgow more generally.45 This gives a strong indication as to why the propagation of anthrax through infected meat was perhaps of greater concern to the people (including medical and veterinary professionals) of Glasgow than occurrences of the disease in industry. Another manifestation of anthrax was picked up by the Herald in 1882 when an outbreak of the disease occurred among horses in Egypt, set against the background of the Second Anglo–Egyptian War. As the Herald reported, ‘the cavalry are suffering severely from an epidemic form of anthrax fever’.46 This was another context in which the disease in animals took precedence over the disease in man, as troops were also cited as suffering on occasion from malignant pustule, doubtless brought on via infection from their horses. The remainder of the 1880s was marked by a virtual absence of reporting of anthrax in man in the Herald. Almost all of the references to the disease came in an agricultural context.47 When this seeming lack of interest was punctuated, moreover, no mention was made of the ‘original’ 1878 cases, of Russian horsehair or of the industry more generally. In 1884, for example, a large public meeting was held at the Trades’ Hall in order to ‘protest against any further restrictions being placed on the importation of live cattle into British ports’.48 On this occasion, anthrax was just one of several diseases mentioned which might be brought into the country by these means; others included pleuro-pneumonia and cattle plague. A major point of argument for the objectors was that these conditions could be ‘carried just as effectually the in [sic] dead flesh, hides, and wool of diseased animals as it can in the living bodies’, and therefore banning importation of live animals would have no effect on the incidence of these diseases.49

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Later in the decade, woolsorters’ disease did find a mention in the columns of the Herald, but in the wider context of disease prevention, and again together with other conditions such as cholera, consumption, diphtheria and pleuropneumonia. Indeed, anthrax was mentioned in the context not of the local horsehair industry, but of Pasteur’s attempts to inoculate against the condition (along with fowl cholera and hydrophobia).50 Tellingly, ‘anthrax or splenic fever, which is so fatal to cattle and sheep’, was said to give rise in man to ‘the fatal “woolsorters’ disease”’, highlighting the detached nature of the Glasgow press from the disease – it was not regarded as a matter of significant local concern in one of their own industries.51 Institutionally, research carried out on anthrax in this period was also presented predominantly in the context of veterinary medicine. In 1894, for example, Mr H. Thompson read a paper to the Scottish Veterinary Medical Society in which he related cases of anthrax to the current legislation governing the reporting of suspected cases. Thompson expressed surprise at the amount of attention that anthrax received as a disease, and ‘failed to see why there should be such an outcry about an outbreak of anthrax’.52 The fact that Thompson’s talk seemingly attracted no controversial discussion suggests that others present at the meeting shared his view that there was little to fear from agricultural anthrax. As far as legislation – referred to by Thompson – was concerned, cases in which compensation was sought by those in agriculture for outbreaks of the disease only found a place in the local press when the details were sufficiently unusual. An 1895 case, in which a farmer alleged that he was sold Turkish oats poisoned with the germs of anthrax, was a notable example of this.53 In this case, ‘the oats when analysed were found to contain germs of the disease’, thus confirming the connection between contamination of foodstuffs and the occurrence of systemic anthrax in ‘several of [the] defendant’s horses’.54 That year also saw the publication of a somewhat peculiar novel, which was reviewed not only in the Glasgow Herald but also, unusually, in the BMJ. Penned by Thomas Mullett Ellis, Zalma was ‘an extraordinary jumble of a story … and, spite, of all the imaginative rant and extravagant absurdity in which the author indulges’, found some favour with the Herald. Zalma, a ‘beautiful, intellectual, seductive daughter of an Anarchist Count’, was spurned by her suitor and as a result developed ‘hatred of the human race’. She thus ‘conceived the magnificently murderous project of destroying all humanity by means of anthrax germs, tubs of which were sent to all the international centres in the world [with] the stuff also being scattered from balloons’.55 Although the BMJ roundly dismissed the work as being ‘curious, incoherent and pretentious’, displaying ‘bald misrepresentation of biological objects’, the Herald had ‘rarely read such a curious mixture of smartness, vulgarity, ingenious fancy, coarseness, piquant satire, and absolute nonsense as this truly original story’.56 Ellis’s characterization of the

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extent to which Zalma was familiar with the nature of anthrax offers an intriguing insight into his expected readership. Zalma herself had studied the nature of the bacillus in detail, and the readers were made well aware of the rapid nature of a death from anthrax, the hardiness of the organism’s spores and the absence of an effective treatment.57 The Herald thus communicated anthrax to its readership in a variety of guises. It was far from the only local newspaper available in Glasgow, however. The chief rival to the Herald was the North British Daily Mail, which had begun circulation in 1848 as Scotland’s first daily newspaper. Although the Daily Mail dominated the local newspaper scene in Glasgow for the two decades after its inception – circulation was 229,000 in 1850 – by the late 1870s the Herald’s star was in the ascendancy.58 The Daily Mail, however – unlike the Herald – did pay some significant attention to the occurrence of anthrax in the city, and three articles from the publication even appeared in the Bradford-based scrapbook of John Henry Bell. The concern of the Daily Mail with trade and industry, rather than the more heavily political Herald, perhaps explains why the publication became more involved with the problem posed by anthrax. The Daily Mail also presented far more material on the general sanitary conditions of Glasgow than did its rival publication. In early 1878, for example, articles were printed addressing air quality, enteric fever, germ theories, hydrophobia, typhoid and a number of pieces discussing the quality of the milk supply to the city.59 The paper was also resolute in its support for the public health measures enacted by James Burn Russell.60 The Daily Mail published details (somewhat ironically taken from the Leeds Mercury rather than the Bradford newspapers) of the inquest into the death of Sargeant Ellis on 7 March 1878 – the same day on which Russell was alerted of the Glasgow outbreak.61 As far as Russell’s report was concerned, the Daily Mail noted that following investigations by ‘the authorities … some days after the deaths had occurred[,] no steps had been taken to disinfect the raw material remaining in the factory’. However, although the paper expressed concern for those whose employment brought them directly into contact with the suspected materials, there was more emphasis placed on the danger that the finished product might pose to the general public: The hair … is made into stuffings for chair bottoms, sofa cushions, and probably mattresses, besides being used for other domestic purposes. It is of the utmost importance that a commodity thus widely distributed and brought into close contact with the persons of all and sundry should be free from infectious disease.62

Some three weeks later the Daily Mail reported on the further cases described in Russell’s report. On this occasion Margaret Donaldson was ‘the fourth employee in the hair and fur factory [Adelphi] on the South Side who has died within the last month of this terrible malady’. The disease was referred to as ‘malignant pustule’ rather than

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anthrax, and Miss Donaldson was clearly aware of the potential fatal course of the condition, as she ‘was afraid she was suffering from the same disease which a month previously had caused the death of three of her fellow-workers’.63 None of the subsequent cases received any attention, however, and the lively correspondence observed in the Bradford press did not materialize in the case of Glasgow. After around 1900, the idea of anthrax as a disease of industry dropped almost entirely from both the Glasgow Herald and the North British Daily Mail. This is perhaps best exemplified by the index to the former publication for 1907, in which the entry for anthrax read: ‘see “Agriculture”’.64 In this year, outbreaks of the disease among cattle in Wigtownshire and East Lothian received particular attention.65 It is striking that although a case of the disease did in fact occur within the Glasgow horsehair industry in 1907, it received less attention than the Wigtownshire outbreak, which was reported in the same issue of the Herald.66 This was to be the last human case in Glasgow reported in the Herald through to 1919, although the paper did comment briefly on incidences of the disease elsewhere, primarily in London.67 Other articles did address the topic of anthrax, but almost exclusively from an agricultural perspective. The only major interest in the disease in humans came from development of legislation in advance of the Anthrax Prevention Act.68 The coverage of anthrax in the Glasgow press was, therefore, incoherent and rather chaotic when compared with the situation in Bradford. Newspapers were, in general, far more concerned with the disease in an agricultural context, but even this was represented in a haphazard fashion. Rather, the piecemeal reporting of the condition in various different contexts points to a lack of local connection between Glasgow and anthrax, arising in marked contrast to the organized manner in which the newspapers of Bradford reported the condition. This lack of ‘localness’ is brought into focus still further by a 1912 MD thesis produced in Glasgow. Lawrence Storey’s Anthrax, with Special Reference to Diagnosis, Prognosis and Treatment relates the details of numerous cases of the disease. Although Storey emphasized the clinical progression of the disease, the most interesting point for our purposes is the fact that the majority of these cases were taken from Dewsbury, just ten miles from Bradford, and a vital centre in the local worsted industry. That Storey had to look to the West Riding for cases when compiling his thesis indicates that by this time the connection between Glasgow and anthrax – established in quite concrete terms by James Russell in 1878 – had all but vanished.69 Despite occasional cases in the professional medical press after the turn of the century, in all but one of these, there was no connection between the occurrence of the disease and the employment of the patient. Glasgow, unlike Bradford, could rely on a number of industries for its economic prosperity, and this affords us a plausible explanation for why its residents had little interest in industrial anthrax. In contrast, the second locality that we

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will consider – Kidderminster – was associated with a single trade in much the same way that Bradford was with the wool industry.

Kidderminster Kidderminster is a town which has been dominated by a single product, carpets, for about 300 years.70

Like both Bradford and Glasgow, Kidderminster was an important industrial centre in the decades around 1900. While Bradford gained fame for its worsted industry and Glasgow for heavy manufacturing, shipbuilding and other trades relying on imported materials, Kidderminster was inextricably linked with carpet manufacturing. One of the town’s most prestigious firms was, and remains, Brinton’s, which we will encounter in more detail in the following chapter. The importance of the carpet industry to the town was – like Bradford’s worsted trade – firmly established by the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, the relationship between Kidderminster and its principal trade was so central that during a period of sustained unemployment and social unrest during the 1820s, many sought to blame the carpet manufacturers for their irresponsible handling of the industry.71 Histories of Kidderminster more often than not emphasize the importance of carpet manufacture in allowing the town to retain a certain amount of economic and social independence from its larger neighbour, Birmingham.72 The occurrence of anthrax in Kidderminster has been the subject of a recent study by Tim Carter. His thesis addresses the disease in this context from 1900 to 1914, and he notes that during this period there were thirty-eight cases of the disease, resulting in five deaths. One of the principal arguments in the current literature is that ‘Kidderminster’s response to anthrax was one of denial and of slow and reluctant adoption of precautionary measures’, in contrast to Bradford, where the ‘active stance on anthrax … was the exception’.73 This section of the chapter aims to analyse the manner in which anthrax was understood in Kidderminster during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It will also look at the way in which cases in Kidderminster were received in Bradford.

Anthrax and Kidderminster In the mid-nineteenth century the medical provision in Kidderminster was so dilapidated that the government ordered a report on the sanitary state of the town. This resulted in vociferous criticism of the medical practitioners themselves.74 Nevertheless, the local council and the medical professionals endeavoured to remedy the situation, and by 1870 Kidderminster had a thriving medical society and death rates from infectious diseases were falling. Anthrax therefore appeared in the context of improving overall health statistics, much like Glasgow.

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Previous studies have outlined the development of the Kidderminster carpet industry prior to 1900 in detail, but anthrax in this period in the town receives only a passing mention.75 Carter raises two occurrences of the disease that merit further consideration. The first of these occurred in 1893 and was treated at Kidderminster Infirmary. This particular case was notable for the use of ipecacuanha as a treatment.76 This substance, derived from the root of the plant Psychotria ipecacuanha, had earlier achieved notoriety as a powerful emetic, and had not at this point been used in Bradford as a treatment for the disease.77 Mr P. E. Davies – whose notes were used extensively in preparing the article – provided a revealing suggestion as to how the patient came to be infected with anthrax. Although the ‘lad seventeen years of age’ was employed as ‘a “creeler” at one of the local carpet mills’, Davies suggested that the source of infection was in fact a woolsorter – the patient’s brother – with whom he shared a bedroom.78 Here, then, is a case to suggest that, prior to 1900, the assumption among medical practitioners in Kidderminster was that the carpet industry itself was not liable to yield any cases of anthrax. The second case came three years later in 1896, and was in this instance confirmed by culturing Bacillus anthracis from the patient – who was again a ‘Wool-sorter’ – another practice absent from Bradford in this period. This second case was actually reported in a paper delivered to the Kidderminster Medical Society, illustrating a parallel between this institution and the Bradford MedicoChirurgical Society as forums for the exchange of information on the disease.79 Seven Kidderminster anthrax cases that were reported in the Lancet form the cornerstone of the current secondary literature; however, the first case mentioned above does not feature.80 Detailed discussion of all of the cases is unnecessary, but there are some aspects of these that merit consideration. J. Lionel Stretton, senior surgeon to the Kidderminster Infirmary and Children’s Hospital, had taken over his father’s medical practice and was a central figure in the local community. His position at the Infirmary meant that he had access to many of the cases of suspected anthrax that occurred in the area, and he reported on a number of them. While president of the Kidderminster Medical Society in 1903, Stretton presented details of two cases of external anthrax that had thus come under his notice. On both occasions the pustule was excised and ‘[b]oth patients were treated with powdered ipecacuanha internally and externally’.81 Later that same year came perhaps one of the most important events in the association between Kidderminster and anthrax, and indeed one with national implications. On 9 March 1903 two employees died at Brinton’s Mill: Joseph Turvey, ‘a woolsorter and a labourer’ and John Hill, a drayman.82 Turvey’s widow, following legal advice from local firm Robbins, Billing and Co., pursued Brinton’s for compensation under the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1897. This piece of legislation, which will be discussed in more detail in the following

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chapter, provided for compensation only in the event of an industrial ‘accident’. The Kidderminster County Court awarded compensation under the Act, which constituted the first occasion on which an industrial disease caused by a ‘microscopic’ entity received such attention.83 Brinton’s challenged the ruling in both the Court of Appeal and finally the House of Lords, but the latter upheld the initial ruling of the County Court.84 In the month prior to Turvey’s death, Kidderminster Chamber of Commerce (in conjunction with those of Bradford and Halifax) had issued a circular letter ‘pointing out the unsatisfactory condition in which Persian wool was received in this country’.85 These revelations received significant attention in the local press, and the Kidderminster Shuttle, the most widely circulated local newspaper, gave particularly extensive coverage to this and other cases of anthrax from 1900 onwards.86 Unlike the press coverage in Bradford, which assumed a certain degree of familiarity with the working conditions associated with anthrax, the Shuttle presented this information formally for its readers in 1903.87 There was also a clear awareness among the Kidderminster press of the way in which West Yorkshire publications reported on the disease. On at least two occasions the Shuttle referred to material published in the Yorkshire Observer.88 Nor was this exchange of information unidirectional. At the 1905 meeting of the British Medical Association, for example, the two leading anthrax investigators from Bradford and Kidderminster – John Henry Bell and J. Lionel Stretton – both gave papers on the subject, and engaged in a discussion with two other Bradford-based physicians – David Goyder and W. H. Horrocks.89 On this occasion, Bell recalled how he had correctly ‘predicted that pulmonary anthracaemia would be found at Kidderminster, Norwich, Leicester, Halifax, and other places’. Stretton – who had provided the medical evidence in the case of Brintons Ltd v. Turvey – welcomed ‘the verdict from the patient’s point … [but] did not expect it to be upheld’, and the two disagreed about whether or not patients with suspected anthrax ought to be admitted to ‘the wards of a general hospital’.90 In his Milroy Lectures of 1905, Thomas Morrison Legge – the first Medical Inspector of Factories – noted that ‘[i]ncidence of anthrax on persons employed in wool is centred almost entirely round the Bradford district of the West Riding and in Worcestershire’. This suggested that at this time the two areas, Bradford and Kidderminster, were regarded as the only districts in which anthrax occurred in any significant amount within the wool industry.91 In the later years of its operations, the Bradford-based AIB included reports of anthrax cases that had occurred in Kidderminster. In 1916, for example, the Board noted that ‘[t]he patients [suffering from anthrax] were employed in four different factories and two different districts – Bradford and Kidderminster’.92 Indeed, Frederick William Eurich, bacteriologist to the Board, made at least one trip to the factories of Kidderminster in order to investigate the conditions under which anthrax occurred in that particular locality.93

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The links between Bradford and Kidderminster were not solely restricted to the activities of specialist medical practitioners in the early twentieth century, however. As far as the employees in the two localities were concerned, ‘[t]here were periodic migrations between Yorkshire and Worcestershire when the balance of trade conditions was tilted one way or the other’.94 One such migrant, Thomas Clee, who was ‘a native of Kidderminster’ but employed variously in his home town and at Mitchell Brothers in Bradford, died from woolsorters’ disease in May 1880 in the West Riding.95 These seemingly mundane, everyday movements of workers between the two localities doubtless served to propagate not only knowledge concerning the disease but also awareness of its significance. While cases such as that of Clee – who had been engaged in the trade for almost fifty years – are extremely difficult to uncover, the significance of these non-professional movements of both knowledge and people should be recognized as an important parallel to the professional work of those such as Bell and Stretton. Indeed, individual employees from Bradford were summoned to give evidence in the Turvey case: Robert Pratt, a woolcomber, and H. J. Peacock, a factory inspector, both looked over the premises of Brinton’s Mill in order to compare the working conditions with those in Bradford.96 One area where anthrax did not attract this level of professional and public interest, however, was East Anglia. Although there were outbreaks of the disease in both animals and man, there were no significant local-level investigations into the condition. The following section will explore the contexts in which the disease emerged in this largely rural locale, and again draw comparisons with the disease as it occurred in Bradford.

East Anglia She begged of him to go to the doctor’s, but he would not.97

Harriet Grice, the widow of George Grice, confirmed at an inquest that she had urged her husband to seek medical advice on the day of his sudden death: Friday, 15 February 1889. She persuaded the reluctant George – a thirty-year-old horsehair dresser – to call for a doctor, and when he was admitted to Sudbury Hospital later that same day, ‘[s]he left him there between three and four o’clock … and didn’t see him again alive’.98 This was one of the most highly publicized occurrences of anthrax in any form in East Anglia around the turn of the century, and the press covered the case in some detail. Although the region did not have the active, prominent anthrax investigators that appeared to characterize the more heavily industrialized centres of Glasgow (Russell), Bradford (Bell and Eurich) and Kidderminster (Stretton), there was a very different kind of anthrax at work.

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A Rural Society The region of East Anglia (taken here to constitute the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and rural Essex) presents a marked contrast to the localities we have already encountered. Whereas Bradford, Glasgow and Kidderminster were all seats of increasing industrialization through the nineteenth century into the twentieth, the wool and textiles industries of Norfolk and Suffolk saw the trade contract dramatically during the nineteenth century to be replaced by agriculture as the mainstay of this largely flat, rural region.99 Historical accounts of the region have tended to focus on the period prior to around 1850, and abound in reference to the mediaeval history of the area, when East Anglia was a major political and economic power. The absence of interest in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East Anglia largely reflects the decline of the region’s household industries and local economy. However, with the continuing strength of the agricultural economy and the persistence of a number of smaller wool and textile manufacturing centres, there was a surprisingly large amount of interest afforded to anthrax within this community. Indeed, the lack of large-scale production ensured that industrial anthrax (and those who encountered it) in East Anglia did not fall within the same network as the rest of the country.100 As we saw earlier, John Henry Bell had (at least according to his own account) predicted the occurrence of anthrax in Norwich as early as 1880.101 The local press did make occasional reference to the disease, even though they referred almost exclusively to its agricultural manifestation.102 The Bury and Norwich Post reported on an outbreak of anthrax among cattle in Cheshire in 1867, for example, as well as the danger posed by carcasses of deceased animals.103 There were only sporadic references to the problem prior to the late 1880s, however, when local interest in the topic took off. After around 1887, the subject of anthrax became commonplace in the columns of the Bury and Norwich Post and Essex Standard, although they continued to be dominated by the animal form of the disease, described as ‘a virulent and fatal malady’.104 Indeed, the Borough of Bury St Edmunds had its own Inspector of Contagious Diseases, Edwin Taylor, who was responsible for ensuring that conditions in animals for which notification was mandatory were being reported in the correct fashion, and also for investigating the occurrence of any such conditions.105 An important consideration for many of those investigating this disease was encouraging swift recognition of a possible case of anthrax, as there would otherwise be a ‘great risk’ to those dealing with the slaughter and handling of the animal, who more often than not were ‘utterly ignorant of the cause of death’.106 From the late 1880s anthrax became progressively more widespread in the region.107 As a result, the activities of the Suffolk Executive Committee – formed under the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act – grew in prominence. When, for example, there was a serious outbreak at Whatfield, near Ipswich, in 1895, the

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local press reported the Committee’s activities in great details.108 During this period, the newspapers noted how anthrax came as ‘another blow … levelled at the agriculturalists’ and in many instances criticized the legislation, which was used to close down not only individual farms but also neighbouring cattle markets and other agricultural institutions.109 In 1899 there was another noteworthy instance of the disease in man, in addition to the case of George Grice referred to above, involving Thomas Knight, Jr and ‘Squeaker’ Gray, both in the employ of Knight’s father, who combined ‘with his innkeeping the business of a horse slaughterer’.110 On this occasion the two men displayed symptoms of external anthrax, and when seen by a local medical practitioner, they were referred immediately to the London Hospital, where a most unusual treatment was attempted on Knight. Instead of amputating one of the unfortunate man’s arms, a large section from around the pustule was removed and ‘replaced … by a piece of healthy flesh from Knight’s thigh’.111 This was the first and only recorded instance in Britain of a patient having an area from which an anthrax pustule was excised replaced with tissue from elsewhere, and the operation was reported to be a success.112 This was another practice which, like treatments in Kidderminster, was never tried in Bradford. As far as the case of Grice was concerned, Dr Holden, who treated the unfortunate man when he arrived at Sudbury Hospital, confirmed that ‘this was the fourth case which has occurred in the district during the last two years in connexion with horsehair factories’.113 The coverage of the disease in East Anglia is also notable for the terminology used by the local press. Whereas ‘woolsorters’ disease’ persisted for many years in Bradford, and became the most prominent way in which the condition was understood throughout the West Riding, there is not a single reference to this term in either the Bury and Norwich Post or the Essex Standard in the nineteenth century. This is indicative not only of the lack of early cases of the disease, but also of the falling number of individuals employed in the wool industry in this locality. When cases did occur, they were generally associated with the horsehair rather than the wool industry. For example, all four instances of anthrax – one of which proved fatal – that were recorded in the Norwich District (which covered Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire) in 1905 arose from ‘Horse-hair manipulating’.114 In the fatal case, the woman in question ‘was a hair drawer, and for about nine years had been employed as an outworker drawing Chinese horse tails’.115 The following year the Factory Inspectorate carried out an investigation where water from a Suffolk stream ‘contaminated with waste from horsehair factories’ was ‘inoculated into one mouse and one guinea-pig’, resulting in the death of both.116 This kind of research had long since ceased to be the major method of determining anthrax contamination in Bradford; instead, bacteriological culturing of the bacillus had become the standard practice, driven largely by the work of Frederick William Eurich for the AIB.

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Although Glasgow, Kidderminster and East Anglia all exhibited different responses – both public and professional – to the occurrence of the disease during this period, they were by no means unique in playing host to anthrax. The final section in this chapter will give a flavour of the variety of other locations where anthrax occurred in Britain.

Anthrax Elsewhere Anthrax was far from restricted to the areas that have been the source of studies for historians; rather, it was a far-reaching condition that cropped up in diverse locations: from the heart of London’s bustling dockside to the remoteness of rural Aberdeenshire.

London Between the end of January and the middle of April, whilst the Shanghai hides were being dealt with, six men employed in the workshop in question suffered from malignant pustule.117

After publishing an investigation into the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease in Bradford in 1881, John Spear – a medical inspector for the Local Government Board – produced a second treatise just three years later.118 On this occasion the subject of his inquiry was anthrax in the London hide and skin trade, where several cases of anthrax had recently been reported. Spear himself stated that his 1883 work ‘may conveniently be regarded as a sequel’ to the earlier investigation conducted in Bradford.119 In this he reaffirmed the importance of the factory environment as a contributing factor to cases of anthrax (Figure 3.1). Although Spear’s work on the condition in Bradford has been cited frequently in the secondary literature, his subsequent study of London is almost entirely absent. Despite this, a considerable amount of attention was afforded during this period to the outbreaks of anthrax in London. Indeed, so frequent were cases in London that in 1893 a government inquiry was launched after the death of a labourer – Samuel Langham – at Guy’s Hospital.120 London-based investigators also featured heavily in the research carried out across Britain during this period. Particularly prominent was Professor William Smith Greenfield, director of the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution from 1878 to 1881 following the resignation of Sir John Burdon Sanderson. Greenfield had a strong association with the work of John Henry Bell in Bradford, and he analysed various samples sent by Bell from suspected cases of woolsorters’ disease and anthrax.121 Greenfield’s Brown Lectures of 1880, entitled ‘Further Investigations on Anthrax and Allied Diseases in Man and Animals’, described an experiment where cows were ‘inoculated with half a drachm of blood from a man who had died of general anthrax (woolsorters’ disease)’, the experimenter

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Figure 3.1: Floor plan of Barrow’s Foreign Hide Liming Shop, included in John Spear’s report on anthrax in London. This follows in a similar vein from the plan of the Adelphi factory included in James Burn Russell’s earlier work on Glasgow. Image reproduced from J. Spear, ‘On the Occurrence of Anthrax amongst Persons Engaged in the London Hide and Skin Trades’, in Twelfth Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1882– 3: Supplement Containing the Report of the Medical Officer for 1882 (London: HMSO, 1883), pp. 98–131, between pp. 104–5; House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.

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having received this blood as a sample from Bell.122 Indeed, Greenfield gave a paper to the Leeds and West Riding Medico-Chirurgical Society in April 1881, where he showed great familiarity with the work of Bell in outlining the association between the Bacillus anthracis and the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease. On this particular occasion, Greenfield confidently pronounced that ‘by the efforts of Dr Bell, the disease had been tracked to its lair, and might, he thought, eventually be destroyed’.123 Greenfield himself was chiefly concerned with developing an animal vaccine against the disease, and Tiggert has noted that Greenfield was successful in doing so prior to the much-revered endeavours of Pasteur during 1881.124 It is perhaps surprising that Greenfield had such a close professional relationship with Bell and yet had no such rapport with James Burn Russell, despite the fact that Greenfield’s Brown Lectures referred to the latter’s work. This may in part be explained by the fact that the subject of Russell’s principal investigation was noted by Greenfield as being ‘a number of cases of malignant pustule’, while both Bell and Greenfield concerned themselves mostly with the internal form of the disease.125 The relationship between Greenfield and Bell is indicative of the strong rapport that was formed between veterinary and medical practitioners in the case of anthrax research in Britain during this period. Anthrax in London was prominent enough to merit a substantial number of articles on the subject in the capital’s leading newspaper. The Times addressed outbreaks of the disease right across the country, in both animals and man.126 Even the activities of the AIB – an exclusively Bradford-based organization – attracted the paper’s interest.127 In addition to the interest in the occurrence of anthrax in local settings around the country, the Times served in much the same way as the Bradford press: it detailed the proceedings of a number of inquests held into suspected anthrax cases in London. In 1915, for example, an inquest was held at Southwark Coroner’s Court into the death of Charles Farrant, a forty-six-year-old butcher’s manager. On this particular occasion frozen rabbits from New Zealand were initially suspected of causing the infection, but ultimately ‘there was nothing to show how it [anthrax] was contracted’.128 While anthrax in both Bradford and Kidderminster had very strong associations with particular industries, the condition as an occupational disease in London occurred in a much wider variety of individuals, from dock labourers to horsehair manufacturers, and from butchers to wool mixers.129 The diverse contexts in which the disease arose were reflected in the recommendations made following the death of Frederick Beeby at Guy’s Hospital in 1914. Here the jury urged that ‘the Home Office should extend the regulations of the Act with regard to anthrax in factories and workshops to wharves and other places where horsehair, hides, skins and pigs’ bristles were dealt with’.130 A year earlier the Times had welcomed the formation of the DCI, which had been established by the Home Office with the goal ‘to inquire into the dangers from infection by anthrax in the

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processes of sorting, willeying, washing, combing, and carding wool, goat-hair, and camel-hair, and in the processes incidental thereto’.131 Although the DCI will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter, it is worth noting here that the Committee extended its operations over a far broader range of trades – the wool, hair and hide industries – than had previously been the case. The AIB, for example, was concerned solely with the wool and worsted industries of the West Riding, while the investigations of John Spear, James Burn Russell and Constant Wells Ponder had been almost entirely restricted to individual occupations or industries.132 Nor was the reporting of anthrax in the Times restricted to instances of anthrax in Britain. Notable cases as far afield as Sweden and New Zealand garnered the attention of the press – the former as a result of the unusual contamination of a batch of sugar with anthrax spores, and the latter when cases of the disease were observed in the cattle of that country.133 The amount of coverage given to the condition following the Anthrax Prevention Act of 1919 also serves to dispel the notion that anthrax became a ‘medical curiosity’ shortly afterwards; a great many articles appeared right through the 1920s, highlighting the ongoing struggle to eradicate the disease.134 Indeed, in 1922 London was the location for the first meeting of the newly established International Advisory Commission on Anthrax, at which ten nations were represented.135 Although the role of this particular organization has not yet attracted scholarly attention, there is evidence to suggest that the exportation of the preventive measures enshrined in the Anthrax Prevention Act – as well as the Act itself – played a crucial role in reducing the incidence of the disease. London was thus an active location for both research into, and comment on, the occurrence of anthrax as an industrial disease. The final section below will pick out some of the other regions in which anthrax was recognized in this period, beginning in Northern Scotland and moving southwards, before finishing across the Pennines from Bradford, in the equally heavily industrialized northern city of Manchester.

Other Localities Anthrax continues to prevail in many districts in Great Britain, and there can be no doubt that the extension of the disease is in some degree due to neglect of certain precautions, which might easily be observed.136

The existence of so-called ‘anthrax districts’ – places across the world where the disease was endemic among either human or animal populations – was taken for granted by medical and veterinary practitioners and others in the decades around 1900. However, although they were quick to point to locations such as Russia (horsehair), Turkey (Van mohair) and Peru (alpaca) as the sources of vari-

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ous dangerous materials, there was far less agreement about where anthrax was the most prevalent within Great Britain. Ponder, for example, listed twenty-two towns (excluding London and Liverpool) that had recorded cases of anthrax ‘amongst those engaged in the hide, skin, and leather industries [alone] during the six years 1904–1909’.137 These included locations as diverse as towns in Nottinghamshire (Retford), Somersetshire (Frome), Glamorganshire (Swansea) and Ireland (Belfast), and Ponder noted that ‘[c]ases are therefore distributed over the whole country, and, except London and Liverpool, no district can be described as a centre’.138 This assessment, of course, does not include the cases that occurred in other industries. The ways in which anthrax was represented in these different geographical areas differed markedly from its construction in Bradford. Although the West Riding press had a clear idea of what constituted an important or significant outbreak of anthrax, these reports were taken up elsewhere in a very different fashion. While the Aberdeen Weekly Journal largely ignored the deaths of 1878 and 1879 among factory workers, for example, its interest (and that of its readers) was piqued in 1880 when woolsorters’ disease struck down a prize heifer near Bradford.139 On this occasion, the Weekly Journal published the extensive story verbatim from the Bradford Observer.140 The Aberdeen paper had, however, maintained an interest in anthrax among animals far earlier in the century, signalling a different understanding of the condition than was the case in Bradford.141 This agricultural attitude towards the disease continued throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century. The Weekly Journal regularly commented on cases as they occurred among animals.142 The Aberdeen Weekly Journal was also one of a very small number of publications that advertised a domestic product claiming to be able to destroy anthrax spores. ‘The St Bede Disinfectant’, endorsed by Edward Klein (with whom Eurich clashed, as we saw in earlier chapters), was tested for efficacy against the ‘Bacilli and Spores of Anthrax’, as well as ‘the Organisms present in CHOLERA and ENTERIC FEVER’.143 The risk posed by anthrax in Cheshire was also one that predominantly threatened agriculture. The local press reported a major outbreak in the county in 1887, and this had particular resonance with the farming community, given the ‘terrible havoc wrought among their herds some years ago by rinderpest’. On this occasion ‘[m]uch sympathy’ was afforded to the unfortunate stock owners – George and John Percival – and this was exacerbated by the fact that just a few months earlier they had ‘lost several head of cattle, which were bitten by a mad dog’.144 This, the first severe outbreak of the disease in the county, was therefore viewed as a problem in the same vein as other agricultural diseases, such as rinderpest, swine fever and cattle plague. In a strong parallel with the Bradford cases of potential compensation, the sympathy among both agriculturalists and

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local residents quickly turned to anger when the authorities refused to award the Percival brothers any money. In the words of the Cheshire Observer: On Wednesday evening an indignation [sic] meeting of the members of the Warrington Farmers’ Club was held at the White Bull Inn, Warrington, to protest against the alleged unjust treatment received by Messrs Percival … with respect to an outbreak of anthrax on their farm.145

The Observer itself, however, took a rather different attitude towards the entitlement of farmers in cases of anthrax: we have little sympathy with any movement for placing outbreaks such as these on a par with foot-and-mouth disease and pleuro-pneumonia in the matter of compensation, unless it is proved up to the hilt that they are natural visitations and not the result of carelessness or negligence.146

Further leading articles followed, and the responsibility for the outbreak became a lively topic of debate. Privy councillors were consulted by deputations on behalf of the Percival brothers, and the Cheshire Chamber of Agricultural conducted a thorough investigation into the source of the infection.147 The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle put a similarly rural spin on the occurrence of anthrax as a disease. Despite including an article reprinted from the BMJ entitled ‘Woolsorters’ Disease’ in 1880, the paper emulated the Cheshire Chronicle in focusing on the condition among animals for the remainder of the nineteenth century.148 Returning closer to Bradford, we saw briefly in Chapter 2 that there was significant coverage of woolsorters’ disease and anthrax in neighbouring Leeds, despite the fact that only very occasional cases were reported in the town. To the west, however, lay Lancashire, with Manchester at its economic and social heart. This was the setting for the pioneering public health work of Sheridan Delépine, whose own research, undertaken largely in his capacity as Professor of Pathology at the University of Manchester, included investigations into anthrax. Delépine’s role was similar to that of Greenfield, insomuch as medical practitioners and coroners sent him samples taken from suspected cases for bacteriological analysis. A typical example of Delépine’s involvement came in 1907 in a case that was itself reported in the Bradford press. An inquest into the sudden death of James NcNaughton, a seaman, was held on 19 March at Salford Royal Hospital, and Delépine was called upon to examine ‘a portion of the man’s body’, which was found to contain ‘anthrax microbes’.149 The coroner concluded that McNaughton had contracted the condition after throwing the carcass of a dead heifer overboard and then, without washing his hands, shaving himself; the bacilli were thus suspected of infecting him through a small cut.

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H. E. Edlin, Medical Officer of Health for Levenshulme, likewise sought bacteriological assistance from Delépine in 1904 when an outbreak of anthrax affected a farmer and several of his cows. Edlin presented details of the subsequent inquiry to the North Western Branch of the Society of Medical Officers of Health later that year, and he noted that during the course of his investigations, ‘the Inspector of the Board of Agriculture … suggested that the tongues [of the cattle] should be examined by Prof. Delépine for anthrax bacilli’. Having received the samples via the local constabulary, Delépine ‘examined microscopically various parts of the seven tongues and … found numerous anthrax bacilli’. He not only cultured the bacilli on various media, but also used the continuing practice of inoculation by injecting guinea pigs and subsequently concluding that ‘the bacilli [were] still virulent and capable of infecting animals’. In addition, a swab, taken from the malignant pustule on the farmer in question, ‘was sent off to Prof. Delépine, marked “urgent”, with an explanatory note, and next morning I [Edlin] received a report by wire: “Anthrax bacilli present in swab received last night”’.150 Delépine himself was seen as a bacteriological expert more widely, and it was he who wrote the entry on anthrax in the Encyclopaedia Medica in 1901. Here he made reference to the nomenclature of the disease; although the entry was under ‘splenic fever’, Delépine noted that ‘[t]his disease is now generally known under the name of anthrax’.151 Indeed, even before the work of the AIB had begun in Bradford, he had carried out his own experiments in order to determine whether steam acted as an effective disinfectant in the case of anthrax.152 Although similarities with Eurich in this respect might seem apparent, Delépine did not have a particular agenda with respect to the disease. Indeed, he also prepared a report for the Cheshire Diseases of Animals Acts Committee in 1905, which dealt with the problem solely in a veterinary context.153 The Manchester Times did discuss anthrax during the 1880s, but the scope was restricted to a context of either agriculture or bacteriology in general rather than industry.154 Although greater interest attended the topic during the following decade (anthrax was described as ‘such a dreaded disease’), this remained almost exclusively in the domain of herd animals; an outbreak that affected fifty-five cattle in Yorkshire warranted attention, while human cases did not.155 Even the death of Isaac Biddulph at St Helen’s in 1895 merited only a very short mention in the Manchester Times. Biddulph, an employee at ‘a local manure factory’, contracted the condition while working with cattle bones, but there was apparently no organized inquest into his death.156 After one article noting the unfortunate Biddulph’s demise, an agricultural perspective on the disease returned to dominance.157 Indeed, when woolsorters’ disease itself received mention in the Manchester press, it did so most prominently after an enormous fire at the factory of Messrs Mitchell Brothers, at whose premises a large proportion of the Bradford cases of

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woolsorters’ disease had occurred.158 Geographical proximity and a shared reliance on industry as a means of commercial success were not therefore sufficient factors to induce the Manchester press to dwell on the matters of anthrax and woolsorters’ disease at any great length. Indeed, the Manchester Times appeared to be far more concerned with agricultural outbreaks of the disease in equally nearby Cheshire than with industrial anthrax across the Pennines.

Conclusion We have seen throughout this chapter the diverse ways in which anthrax was understood by professional and public groups and individuals across Britain. While it might initially be expected that the industrial centres of Glasgow and Kidderminster might have viewed the disease in a similar manner to Bradford, significant differences can be seen between the three. In Glasgow, for example, the emphasis in the popular press was on the condition as an agricultural disease; the sale of diseased meat was the major risk to human life from anthrax. The fact that the city’s foremost anthrax investigator, James Burn Russell, studied the condition in his capacity as Medical Officer of Health meant that his perspective on the disease was that of a public health official. This arose in marked contrast to individuals such as Bell and Eurich in Bradford, whose roles with respect to the disease were very different. Meanwhile, Kidderminster lacked the well-organized investigations into the problem of industrial anthrax that were present in the West Riding. The importance of the carpet trade to the town’s economic success resulted in greater coverage of the condition in industry than was the case in Glasgow, and J. Lionel Stretton achieved notoriety as a local anthrax expert, in much the same way as Bell and Eurich did in Bradford. There was a significant exchange of both specialist and lay knowledge concerning the disease between Kidderminster and Bradford, exemplified by evidence given at inquests, shared press coverage and the largely unrecoverable movement of workers between the two areas. East Anglia, in contrast, was an area where the British wool industry had once flourished, but which was, by the mid-nineteenth century, in terminal decline. Anthrax here was dealt with on a case-by-case basis, and the region lacked the more organized investigations of Glasgow, Kidderminster and Bradford. The increase in the relative importance of agriculture to the local economy meant that the disease featured more in this context than might be expected. With a lack of clearly defined expertise surrounding the disease, standard local practices – prevalent in Kidderminster and Bradford – did not emerge, and many cases were (if time permitted) referred to the London hospitals, where there had been far more frequent encounters with the disease.

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The focus of the secondary literature on the localities where anthrax emerged most often and most prominently – Bradford, Glasgow and Kidderminster – has obscured the fact that the condition was far from restricted to these major centres. The disease attracted interest throughout Britain, although the manner in which this occurred varied very widely, from the manufacture of manure in northern Scotland, to the rearing of deer in the southern county of Hampshire. The variety of nomenclature surrounding this disease has again been a central theme in this chapter. Previous histories have largely taken ‘woolsorters’ disease’ to be a term which effectively pre-dated anthrax on a national level. However we have seen that even when used in the press elsewhere in Britain, this name was restricted almost exclusively to the disease as it arose in the West Riding. Without even invoking the more geographically loaded terms of la maladie de Bradford or Bradford’s disease, therefore, a strong link was established between the West Riding of Yorkshire and the term ‘woolsorters’ disease’. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that this was the cradle from which this idiom emerged. Following on from this exploration of the differences in understandings of the disease across Britain, the next chapter will examine attempts to deal with the condition by enacting legislative measures in an industrial setting. From initial, embryonic (and non-compulsory) codes of practice instituted in Bradford from 1880 onwards, calls for enforceable, nationwide regulations from various interest groups grew steadily louder. Bradford-based workers, employers and medical practitioners, and their associated social organizations, were active participants in the debate over legislation, and they campaigned to include local factory practices in national statute with varying levels of success. The tension between capital and labour in terms of regulatory strategies therefore constitutes the subject of the next chapter, which will draw to a close the discussion on the disease in a national context.

4 COMPENSATING AND PROTECTING: ANTHRAX AND LEGISLATION

The element of accident … did not lie in the disease itself, but in the circumstances causing and preceding the infection … It was accidental, for instance, that the germ was in the wool at all; that it escaped expulsion by the draught of the ventilating fan; and that it alighted upon a particularly sensitive part of the man’s anatomy.1

By the time that W. Addington Willis expressed these sentiments in the second decade of the twentieth century, claims put forward by workers for compensation after developing anthrax during the course of their employment were commonplace. The landmark ruling – referred to in the previous chapter – in the case of Turvey v. Brintons, Limited (1904), and the subsequent enshrinement of anthrax within the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1906, enabled workers to bring a case for compensation against their employer(s). But while national legislation directed specifically towards anthrax (at least in humans) was a feature of the twentieth century, attempts to regulate the occurrence of the disease locally had been around for many years previously. Here we will establish how and why the approach to regulation of anthrax moved from the local, non-enforceable rules that were introduced in the 1880s to large-scale, national pieces of legislation that characterized subsequent decades. Ian Mortimer and Joseph Melling have recently argued that the ‘politicization of the disease’ best explains the ‘chronology of regulation’ in the case of anthrax.2 For Mortimer and Melling, ‘the development of state regulation can be better understood in a context of industrial and market relationships … These relations were clearly shaped by the rise of a new Labour politics which first erupted in the 1880s and culminated in the national election victories of 1924 and 1929’.3 This chapter seeks to complement their reinterpretation of the government-supported disinfection station, opened at Liverpool, which Mortimer and Melling characterize as a small-scale and financially unsound enterprise, designed to function more as a model to be followed in other countries than as a place where all potentially dangerous, imported materials would be made safe.

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Discussion of the relationship between anthrax and legislation appears only sporadically within other secondary literature. Rosemary Wall has argued that bacteriological knowledge was mobilized by non-specialists – particularly workers and lawyers – during the course of inquests and claims for compensation.4 Tim Carter’s study of Kidderminster, which we encountered in Chapter 3, discusses the manner in which regulation was developed in that particular locality.5 Other recent work on anthrax has meanwhile continued to reiterate the claim that the Anthrax Prevention Act served as a watershed piece of legislation which relegated the disease to the level of a medical curiosity. Chris Holmes, for example, argues that ‘[Frederick William] Eurich continued to sample the wool before and after disinfection [at Liverpool]. He proved that the process worked … Cases of inhalation anthrax in the wool industry diminished sharply after this’.6 Richard Swiderski, writing along similar lines, notes that: The Anthrax Abatement Act [sic] of 1919 finally gave the government the power to ban the import of raw materials and processed goods likely to be infected with anthrax. These items could only be brought through ports equipped to disinfect them by duckering. In 1921 Liverpool became the first port and for a long time the only port equipped with such a station. Reported anthrax cases declined to the point that woolsorters disease became a medical curiosity by the late 1920s.7

This chapter, which seeks to both unify and add to these disparate accounts of anthrax legislation, is divided into four sections. We will first look at the rules and regulations specific to Bradford prior to and during the 1880s, before seeing how the oft-cited Bradford Rules formed the basis for national legislative endeavours under the Factory and Workshop Acts of 1891 and 1895. The emergence of compensation for anthrax, particularly through the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1906, and a consideration of the Anthrax Prevention Act of 1919 form the second half of the chapter, when we will also see comparisons between these and earlier legislative efforts. The literature discussing anthrax in this period has broadly portrayed the disease as either a critical element in establishing the science of bacteriology as a new and central approach to medicine and illness, or an industrial disease that demanded changes in general practices. This chapter will argue that despite the apparent initial success of John Henry Bell and others in identifying Bacillus anthracis as the cause of woolsorters’ disease, from the early 1890s onwards attempts to control factory environments dominated over and above efforts to neutralize or destroy the threat of anthrax at the level of the bacteria or spores. Bacteriological techniques may have been the principal tools of Frederick William Eurich, but strong efforts were made to ensure that the results which he achieved in the laboratory could be replicated in a mocked-up, small-scale indus-

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trial context.8 The sanitary environment of the factory was therefore paramount, rather than the underlying pathology of anthrax or the petri dish. Historians of medicine have recently revealed how attempts to combat infectious disease did not become universally dominated by bacteriological thinking in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.9 Rather, efforts to remove these conditions from both industry and society relied on practical measures that were rationalized in terms of purifying working and living conditions. Removing dust, minimizing workmen’s contact with supposedly infected materials and daily cleaning of sorting-rooms were just some of the measures used to try and combat occupational anthrax in this period. As Christopher Hamlin has noted in the context of water purity, the initial promises of a bacteriological approach ‘had not lived up to expectations’.10 The case of anthrax in industry, to a certain extent, runs in parallel with Hamlin’s account; the initial optimism of the early 1880s was replaced by a pragmatic acceptance that the bacillus itself (or, more correctly, the resilient spores) could not be destroyed in a manner that was sufficiently effective and economically viable, and which preserved the integrity of the raw materials in anthrax-susceptible industries. The environmental space that existed between the workmen and the dangerous substance therefore became the focus of preventive legislation and regulations. To counteract the avowedly dangerous nature of the occupations that workers undertook, separate statutes were enacted that provided compensation for them, or their dependents, in the event of contracting anthrax. A broad range of sources, including newspaper reports, parliamentary papers, Home Office minutes of evidence and published responses to legislation from medical practitioners, workers and other social groups will be used throughout this chapter. Anthrax was by no means the only condition that was the subject of legislative discussion (and controversy) during this period; the roles of three inorganic poisons – lead, phosphorous and arsenic – were also prominent. Miner’s nystagmus, meanwhile, was a flagship condition for which workmen attempted to claim compensation from employers.11 However, even though the incidence of these other conditions was much greater, anthrax continued to attract a significant amount of attention from both the public and professionals.

Early Local Regulation The first formal attempt designed to prevent anthrax in the wool industry was the codification of the Bradford Rules of 1884. They were established by employers, workmen and medical practitioners following the death of Isaac Saville – a woolsorter employed at Mitchell Brothers – on 26 May 1884. As we shall see, these Bradford Rules – which were more a code of practice than anything else – would ultimately serve as a model for future legislation.

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This section will look at how initial, informal suggestions put forward to help safeguard workers gradually became amended in the years leading up to the creation of the Bradford Rules in 1884.

Regulation before the Bradford Rules Prior to the instigation of the Bradford Rules, various groups made suggestions to prevent the occurrence of woolsorters’ disease and anthrax in and around Bradford. These began with informal measures suggested by both workmen and, later, medical practitioners, largely designed to improve the environment within factories. After performing a post-mortem examination of a woolsorter who had suddenly died, Samuel Lodge, Sr, a Bradford-based general practitioner, suggested ‘the use of chlorine gas in the sorting-room, as a preventative which will never fail’. Lodge, Sr also encouraged the worker to ‘wear the hair on his upper lip, naturally, not twisted up into a fashionable moustache … but growing straight downwards like that of a French workman’. This, he said, would act as ‘the best of all respirators’.12 By 1878, however, John Henry Bell noted that despite being recommended ‘over & over again … [work]men would not take the trouble’ to use respirators of any kind.13 The theme of idleness on the part of the workforce continued to be a major source of contention. It was noted on one occasion, for example, that an instruction to employees to open baskets of wool in order to allow dust to be removed – ‘through sheer laziness – had not been complied with, the men evidently preferring to run the risk of encountering the disease than go to the trouble of opening out the baskets’.14 Coroners’ inquests, however, were to become the most important forum within which safety recommendations were discussed and put to manufacturers. While suggestions from individual medical practitioners, workmen and employers as to what might constitute effectual measures continued to be put forward elsewhere, the inquest was the chief forum from which preventive measures emanated, following John Henry Bell’s assertion that Samuel Firth had died as a result of his employer’s neglect in May 1880.15 In the case of Firth, the resulting inquest may have seen Mitchell and Shepherd – Firth’s employers – cleared of any wrongdoing, but the questions of both prevention and responsibility were taken up strongly by the local press. Indeed, the power and importance of coroners’ inquests were magnified by the involvement of these newspapers. The Bradford Daily Telegraph argued, for example, that: If an employer sends a man to work upon a scaffold which the employer knows to be insecure … and an accident happens, the law holds the employer responsible to the State. It is impossible to discern any valid difference between such a case and ‘the accidents’ which result in death from woolsorters’ disease.16

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The Bradford Observer, for its part, expressed the hope in advance that the inquest would ‘be such as to compel a general change in the mode operating on these poisonous wools’.17 Bell had previously encountered several cases of supposed woolsorters’ disease, a number of which had occurred at the premises of Mitchell and Shepherd. By this stage, however, he was clearly disenchanted with the unwillingness of employers to act on suggestions put forward by medical practitioners to safeguard workers. Bell’s claim that negligence on the part of Firth’s employer directly contributed to the fatal outcome of the case obliged the Bradford borough coroner – J. G. Hutchinson – to open an inquiry into the death. Indeed Bell had in fact reported the death directly to the police, with the goal of securing a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding Firth’s death.18 The inquest was under the chairmanship of the coroner, who would ultimately recommend a verdict to an independent jury, who had the final decision in each case. Those who gave evidence during the course of the inquest were Harris Butterfield (Medical Officer of Health for Bradford), Henry Mitchell and Major William Shepherd (representing their firm), John Spear (representing the Local Government Board), Mary Firth (widow of the deceased), Mr D. Parkinson (a surgeon who conducted the post-mortem), James Binns (a mohair merchant), John Ashworth and James Scott (foremen with whom Firth worked), William Jackson and Job Bower (woolsorters), W. T. McGowen (the Town Clerk) and, last but not least, John Henry Bell.19 While there is no mention made in records of those others who attended proceedings, the mere fact that inquests were required to be carried out in public, allied to the extensive newspaper coverage afforded to the inquiry, suggests that members of the public attended. That the town hall was used rather than a local public house also supports the claim that the proceedings themselves were witnessed by a significant number of Bradfordians.20 During the course of the proceedings, the coroner became ‘satisfied that the jury also would be wishful that the inquiry should be full and exhaustive, so that it might be ascertained if something could be done in alleviation of the disease’.21 As a result, the members of the jury were urged by the coroner to ‘consider whether or not they could make recommendations which would have the effect of preventing as far as possible further occurrences of this disease’.22 After the coroner summed up at the close of proceedings on 9 June, the jury retired for just over half an hour to consider their verdict. In addition to exempting Mitchell and Shepherd from any culpability, they offered a series of specific recommendations and one rather diffuse suggestion for preventing further deaths. In the first place, they proposed that:

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The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920 before a bale of wool be opened, it be steeped in hot water not less than twelve hours, the heat to be not less than 120 degrees; that after such steeping the wool be placed in a sud of hot water, washed, passed through rollers, and again washed in a fresh sort of hot water, partly dried, but sorted when damp; that the sorting room be well ventilated, the floor swept daily, the walls and ceiling swept once a month, and the walls limewashed with lime mixed with carbolic acid every six months; that no wool or hair be stored in the sorting room, that no meals be taken in it, and that proper provision be made for sorters to wash in or near the sorting room.23

In addition to these practical measures, however, the jury also advised ‘that if there exists no sufficient legal authority to enforce proper regulations, powers should be obtained for that purpose, applicable to the United Kingdom, and that the sorting of wool and hair be placed under the control of the Factory Inspectors.24 It was also in response to Firth’s death that an inquiry was launched by the Local Government Board, and this was duly undertaken by John Spear, although William Smith Greenfield conducted laboratory analysis on his behalf.25 The report – published in 1881 – contained details of some forty-one cases that had been brought to the attention of Spear, and concluded by summarizing the most recent developments as to which safety measures had been put into practice. It is evident that the recommendations put forward by the jury in the case of Samuel Firth were not adopted wholesale, and were in fact simply the basis for negotiation between employers and employees. In the first place, manufacturers insisted that it was impractical to consider ‘Turkey and Cape mohair and alpaca ‘to be ‘“noxious” wools’, as the ‘fineness of their fibre’ dictated that washing these particular fleeces rendered sorting impossible.26 In response to this proclamation, the sorters themselves re-examined the nature of the regulations suggested by the Firth jury, and, as a body of workers, passed a series of resolutions. Chief among these were: That ‘inferior grey’ … and all Cape hair, as well as those mentioned by the employers, are injurious, and ought to be washed before sorting … That all damaged wools ought to be treated with chemical disinfectants or steeped in hot, not cold, water, before the usual process of washing. That to prevent disputes, ‘noxious’ wools should be explicitly defined. That the process of disinfection must be thorough, as damaged wool often smells worse after washing than before. That the foregoing treatment can only be considered as provisional and experimental.27

Subsequent inquests did not provoke such detailed discussion of safety measures, and the coroner and his juries simply reaffirmed the importance of firms adhering to those already in place.28 There was, however, one notable exception.

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The Death of Isaac Saville On 26 May 1884, after ‘a short illness’, Isaac Saville – a sixty-eight-year-old woolsorter – died as a result of contracting ‘blood poisoning from bacilla [sic] anthracis, commonly called woolsorters’ disease’.29 The object of the inquest ordered into the death of Saville by Bradford’s coroner was not, therefore, to establish the cause of death, which was already known. Rather, it was hoped that a thorough examination of the circumstances surrounding the fatality would give an indication not only as to whether safety measures had been adhered to, but also whether they required revision. To this end, after the first session of the inquest, the Medical Officer of Health for Bradford, Thomas Whiteside Hime, was appointed by the coroner to review the existing regulations and assess their effectiveness.30 Hime himself was an ardent and flamboyant promoter of bacteriological methods, and he ‘regarded the recommendation about fans for the purpose of carrying away the dust as exceedingly important’.31 During the course of the inquest, Hime consulted extensively with the Sanitary Committee of Bradford Town Council and attended all sessions convened by the coroner.32 Evidence provided by colleagues of Saville brought to light the fact that many had ‘not seen a printed copy of recommendations and rules’, and one confessed that ‘he never knew that it was his duty when he came across a damaged bale to call the foreman’s attention to it’.33 Aside from the unusual step of inviting revision of preventative regulations while the inquest was still in progress, the case of Saville was marked by the active contributions of the Town Clerk, W. T. McGowan, who represented the Sanitary Committee. In this capacity, McGowan reported that he had ‘forwarded to the manufacturers a copy of the suggestions laid before the Court [by Hime] … He was also in communication with the workpeople’.34 Discussion of safety measures had expanded beyond the boundaries of the inquest, therefore, and more informal discussions took place between McGowan, Hime and both employers and employees. This negotiation was actively encouraged by the coroner, who stated that ‘he would be pleased to receive any suggestions with the view of preventing the disease’.35 By the time that the inquest had reached its conclusion towards the end of August, the issue of general regulations had completely superseded the singular case of Isaac Saville. McGowan announced to the jury that ‘employers and workmen had conferred, and agreed to a code of regulations to be put in force in the future’, and the jury in their turn approved these with only a minor amendment to the treatment of dust collected by the fans.36 These regulations, the first to involve consultation with such a wide variety of representatives, were also the first that were distributed in the form of a poster. Although cautionary notices would evolve over the following decades to include elaborate images of industrial conditions (see Figure 4.1), the presence of these

ANTHRAX PRt:SCJUBED fORM Of CAunoHoi.R\' NonC£ TO 8t: AFFIXED IN CERTAIN FACTOIIU:.S AND WOnsHOPS.

Different Appearances of Anthrax on the Skin (f"t'