Mortality or Morality? Keeping Workers Safe in the First World War

Abstract

In February 1915, Home Office pathologist, Dr Bernard Spilsbury, conducted a post-mortem on the body of a man who had been poisoned while employed in the manufacture of the explosive, trinitrotoluene (TNT). Dr Thomas Legge, Medical Inspector of Factories, who was present at the post-mortem, concurred with Spilsbury’s conclusion that the man’s death was due to a form of toxic jaundice, liver disease caused by exposure to TNT.¹ Most contact with this substance however took place, not in the manufacture of TNT, but in munitions factories, where large numbers of women were employed in filling explosive shells. Legge began investigating whether similar cases of liver disease had occurred amongst these workers and by the summer of that year had identified 46 such cases, including two deaths.² Toxic jaundice was immediately designated a notifiable disease, requiring cases to be officially reported to the Home Office. By the end of 1918 a further 430 cases, of which 111 were fatal, had been recorded.³