author
J. T. (John Thomas) Arlidge
1822–1899
A Victorian physician who moved from asylum medicine into pioneering work on workers’ health, he became one of the best-known medical voices on the dangers faced by pottery workers in North Staffordshire. His writing linked medicine to everyday working life in a way that still feels strikingly modern.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in Chatham in 1822, John Thomas Arlidge trained in medicine at King’s College London and earned his BA and MB in 1846. Early in his career he studied continental approaches to mental illness and spent more than a decade working in asylum medicine in London, where he wrote on lunacy law, asylum design, and the treatment of patients.
In 1862 he moved to North Staffordshire to become a physician at the North Staffordshire Infirmary. There he turned his attention to the health of industrial workers, especially people employed in the pottery trade. His studies of dust, dangerous workshop conditions, and shortened life expectancy helped make him an important early figure in occupational medicine.
Arlidge’s best-known later work, Hygiene, Diseases and Mortality of Occupations (1892), was widely regarded as a major survey of industrial disease in Britain. He was also involved in public investigations into employment conditions in the Potteries, and his career shows how Victorian medicine was beginning to look beyond individual illness to the risks built into work and environment.