“When I moved from Scarborough to Leeds, I was at once struck by the fact that the general appearance of the children was much paler, and their fibre less vigorous here than in Scarborough and its environs.  I saw, too, that many children were exceptionally small for their age.  I have met with numberless cases of scrofula, lung trouble, mesenteric affections, and indigestion, concerning which I, as a medical man, have no doubt that they arose from mill work.  I believe that the nervous energy of the body is weakened by the long hours, and the foundation of many diseases laid.  If people from the country were not constantly coming in, the race of mill-hands would soon be wholly degenerate.”

So, too, Beaumont, surgeon in Bradford: 

“To my thinking, the system, according to which work is done in the mills here, produces a peculiar relaxation of the whole organism, and thereby makes children in the highest degree susceptible to epidemic, as well as to incidental illness.  I regard the absence of all appropriate regulations for ventilation and cleanliness in the mills very decidedly as the chief cause of that peculiar tendency or susceptibility to morbid affections which I have so frequently met in my practice.”

Similar testimony is borne by Dr. Ray: 

(1) “I have had opportunity of observing the effects of the factory system upon the health of children under the most favourable circumstances (in Wood’s mill, in Bradford, the best arranged of the district, in which he was factory surgeon). (2) These effects are decidedly, and to a very great extent, injurious, even under these most favourable circumstances. (3) In the year 1842, three-fifths of all the children employed in Wood’s mill were treated by me. (4) The worst effect is not the predominance of deformities, but of enfeebled and morbid constitutions. (5) All this is greatly improved since the working-hours of children have been reduced at Wood’s to ten.”

The Commissioner, Dr. Loudon himself, who cites these witnesses, says: 

“In conclusion, I think it has been clearly proved that children have been worked a most unreasonable and cruel length of time daily, and that even adults have been expected to do a certain quantity of labour which scarcely any human being is able to endure.  The consequence is that many have died prematurely, and others are afflicted for life with defective constitutions, and the fear of a posterity enfeebled by the shattered constitution of the survivors is but too well founded, from a physiological point of view.”

And, finally, Dr. Hawkins, in speaking of Manchester: