Safe at Work? Ramazzini Versus the Attack on Health & Safety

 

By Dave Putson
September 2013
Spokesman
Distributed By
ISBN: 9780851248226                         
184 pages
$39.50 Paper original

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This is an important time to write the history of health and safety in the UK, given the near derision that the term now evokes in the media and from the Government. What Dave Putson demonstrates in writing this book is that health and safety, far from being the product of a more litigious society or the political agenda of overbearing bureaucrats, is rooted in human need, protecting people.

This book describes how, over the last 300 years, an evoloving body of surveys, research, legal challenges and often tragic experiences led to an emergence of, at first, quite limited protections. Some of these histories will be familiar to the reader, like the match girls and 'phossy jaw', but others, like the seminal legal case of Priestly vs Fowler, are not. What the vaired and fascinating histories indicate is that health and safety evolved to improve not only the workplace, but also our homes, our communities, our roads, our waterways, and public and environmental health.

 

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