The Founding of Occupational Medicine
The work of Bernardino Ramazzini
Though in modern days it is easy to scoff at health and safety requirements at work but the alternative is infinitely worse.
Long ago before health and safety existed there was often cases of people from certain occupations suffering from increased rates of some diseases and disorders and no one linked it to the jobs they did. The main problem with this was that people would go to the doctors and discuss their ailments but the doctor would never ask about your occupation, as it wasn't required nor was it deemed necessary at the time, so there would not be able anyway to link the people with these conditions together.
However this changed with the pioneering work by Bernardino Ramazzini: De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (Diseases of Workers). Here he made links between certain occupational hazards and health conditions, one such case was of when a notary complained of pain in the right arm which lead to palsy in it, so he learned to write in his left arm which late succumbed to the same condition. This was puzzling to the doctors of the time however Bernardino noticed that his job as a notary required excessive amounts of writing so he speculated that his injury was a result of his work, which was right at least when other people in similar professions complained of similar injuries. Another example of this were sedentary workers (chair workers) who would become ill quite easily with itches and general ill health, he concluded that it was due to a lack of movement in their jobs, something that holds true to today.
He also had work in other fields noticeably in the field of malaria treatment, where he advocated for the use of cinchona bark for the treatment of malaria, something some of his contemporaries sore off as they believed it was highly toxic. In the end the active ingredient of cinchona bark, quinine, is still use don malaria medicine today. A final idea he proposed was that nuns develop breast cancer at a much higher rate than the average person because of a lack of sexual activity, this however has yet to be proven.
So in conclusion without the work of Bernardino it is likely that health and safety practices in work would look very different to today and almost definitely more people would have died.
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