Checking the Waste: A Study in ConservationGregory, Mary Huston
History
Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation
Gregory, Mary Huston
Conservation of natural resources; United States -- Economic conditions
When the cause is failure to provide suitable safeguards to machinery,
or to warn employees of danger, the penalty to the employers should be
made severe, so that no consideration of money will prevent them from
taking precautions. More often, however, the injury is due to the
carelessness of the men or to the fact that they try to run machines
with which they are unfamiliar.
Manual training schools, night schools for working-men, with a short
apprenticeship in the running of machinery and an explanation of the
dangers, will go far to prevent this class of accidents, but the fact
will still remain, that often those who are most familiar with machinery
become careless and are more liable to injury than beginners.
The number of accidents that have been added to the world's list by
automobiles, both to those riding and to persons who are run over by
them, is great and is in a large measure due to carelessness in handling
the machine or to reckless driving.
The entire number of accidents in the United States, including railway
accidents, reaches the immense total of sixty thousand killed and many
times that number injured. A most appalling waste of life and labor
value!
Professor Ditman says, "Of 29,000,000 workers in the United States over
500,000 are yearly killed or crippled as a direct result of the
occupations in which they are engaged--more than were killed and wounded
throughout the whole Russo-Japanese War. More than one-half this
tremendous sacrifice of life is needless."
Until the last quarter of a century there was a large addition to the
death rate each year from the blood poisoning following operations and
injuries making open wounds. It was not until the discovery of the germs
which cause septic poisoning that deaths from these causes could be
checked. The use of antiseptics, such as carbolic acid, alcohol, and
various other preparations, the boiling of all surgical instruments, and
the boiling or baking of all articles used in the treatment of open
wounds and sores has reduced the death rate at least one-half.
The rate could be lowered much more if all sores were treated as
surgical cases and carefully sterilized from the beginning. About
eighty-five deaths out of every hundred from these causes might be
prevented.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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