ACCIDENTS IN FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS.

313 paper was to throw light on this startling increase in the number of those reported accidents during the 18 years dealt with in this table. It was pointed out that the provisions dealing with such accidents in the involving the safety of numberless lives, the present Factory Acts of 1891, 1895, and 1906 were far more comanomalies cannot be permitted to endure. Like so many prehensive than those in the preceding Act of 1878. Not physiological problems, those presented by colour-blindness only were many additional non-fatal classes of accidents demand an extensive knowledge of physical facts, and made reportable by the more recent Acts, but reports were it is imperative that those who conduct the examina- also, for the first time, required from the occupiers of docks, tions, whether primarily physiologists or physicists, must wharves, quays, warehouses, and certain laundries; the reof such accidents was also made compulsory on the have acquired that competent knowledge of physiology porting occupiers of factories, workshops, &c., with liability to and physics which is more likely to be found in the penalty for omission to report. The number of factory physiologist than in the physicist, but even then only after inspectors was increased, moreover, from 88 in 1894 to 200 the devotion of special study to the particular subject. in 1908, and prosecutions for failure to notify accidents were In our opinion the whole question should be referred to a frequently instituted throughout the period under notice. The Royal Commission or to a committee of the Royal Society, increasing liberality and general extension of the provisions in successive Workmen’s Compensation Acts, more especially upon which physiologists and ophthalmologists who have in the Act of 1897, have without doubt also greatly tended given special attention to the subject should be adequately to increase the number of reported accidents. During the represented. Among the duties of such a committee would be period under review there was, too, a marked increase of the re-investigation of tests for colour-blindness with a view activity in trade, and of both the number and the proportion to selecting those most appropriate to the end in view, and of the population exposed to risk of accident in factories, the reorganisation of the examinations to ensure the efficient workshops, &c., through the decline of home industries and the of machine for hand labour. These were substitution carrying out of the tests. It would then be seldom, if ever, some of the causes referred to in Mr. Verney’s paper in necessary to have recourse to a court of law to adjudicate on explanation of the great increase in the number of reported what is a purely scientific question. accidents in factories and workshops between 1890 and 1907. If these several causes do not entirely account for the increase of reported accidents, it is at any rate obvious that the official crude figures, which served as the basis of this paper, should not be accepted as affording trustworthy of real increase in the proportional number of evidence "Ne quid nimis." preventable accidents, and still less of any increasing neglect of due care for the safety of workers in factories and

of far greater difficulty and complexity and laymen in general realise, but Gazette Shipping the feeling must be unanimous that in so serious a question,

The

subject

is

one

than the

Annotations. "

THE RESEARCH

DEFENCE SOCIETY.

in another column a letter signed by Lord Cromer, the Hon. Sydney Holland, Dr. F. M. Sandwith, and Mr. Stephen Paget, respectively President, chairman of committee, honorary treasurer, and honorary secretary of the Research Defence Society, which sets out briefly the work accomplished by the society during the past 12 months. We hope the medical profession will read this studiously moderate communication, for it proves the established position of the society and its activity in the defence of scientific workers upon whose efforts much of our medical progress will depend in the future, as it has depended in the past. Weknow from frequent communications which we receive on the subject that members of the medical profession deeply resent the accusations of cruelty which are brought against many of those engaged in scientific research. All these should support the Research Defence Society by their subscriptions, and use their voices among their patients to increase the large number of persons, medical and lay, who are resolved to defend the cause of science from the malice or inaccuracy of the faddist, never more difficult to deal with than when reinforced by the amiable convictions of the

WE

workshops.

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publish

humane sentimentalist. ____

ACCIDENTS IN

FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS.

AT the meeting of the Royal Statistical Society on Jan. 18th a paper was read by Mr. H. Verney, one of H.M. factory inspectors, on the reported accidents involving fatal or’ bodily injury to workers in factories and workshops. It appears from a table in the appendix to the annual report of the chief inspector of factories for the year 1907 that the annual reported number of this class of accidents increased from 8211 in 1890 to 124,325 in 1907 ; of the latter number 1179 were fatal accidents. The main object of the

A MEDICAL EXAMINER

IN

PHYSICS.

THE coordination of the pre-clinical and clinical studies of me dical curriculum is the order of a day which is in revolt against the multiplication of special studies in our medical schools. When it has been finally decided that the student cannot be turned into a complete chemist, physicist, biologist,

the

pharmacist, anatomist, physiologist, obstetrician, physician, and surgeon within the space of five years, the question at once is raised whether it is desirable that the preliminary subjects should be taught by specialists, each convinced of the supreme virtue of his own particular brand of "leather," or whether they should be handed over to practitioners of medicine having special knowledge of one or other of the preliminary studies and able to judge of its application to the main business of the medical student’s labours. Not so very many years ago it was almost the invariable custom at the hospital schools for one of the physicians to take charge of the physiological department in the same way as in most schools the study of anatomy is still presided over by one of the surgeons, although in the universities the professors of anatomy and physiology have usually specialised exclusively in their own sciences. The advantage of using the special teacher with full knowledge of his subject, able to demonstrate the principles of that subject with assurance and a ripe faculty of illustration, is very considerable, but the old plan of science teaching by men actively engaged in clinical work had its merits. The advantages of such teaching must at any rate be very great when it is given by a practitioner really competent to undertake it, and knowing at first hand the exact principles which will have most bearing upon the after-studies of the men under his charge. But there

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