Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- 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
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Compensating and Protecting: Anthrax and Legislation
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- 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
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
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.
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Making of Modern Anthrax, 1875–1920Uniting Local, National and Global Histories of Disease, pp. 91 - 116Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014