“The mortality of those who dig minerals is very great, and women who marry men of this sort marry again and again.”

Those who sit at their work and are therefore called ‘chair workers,’ such as cobblers and tailors, suffer from their own particular diseases …

[We] ought to show peculiar zeal…in taking precautions for their safety. I for one have done all that lay in my power, and have not thought it beneath me to step into workshops of the meaner sort now and again and study the obscure operations of mechanical arts.

I have noticed bakers with swelled hands, and painful, too; in fact the hands of all such workers become much thickened by the constant pressure of kneading the dough.

He learned to write with his left hand, which was soon thereafter seized with the same disorder.

Not only in antiquity but in our own times also laws have been passed…to secure good conditions for workers; so it is right that the art of medicine should contribute its portion for the benefit and relief of those for whom the law has shown such foresight…

Those who work standing … carpenters, sawyers, carvers, blacksmiths, masons … are liable to varicose veins … [because] the strain on the muscles is such that the circulation of the blood is retarded.

All sedentary workers … suffer from the itch, are a bad colour, and in poor condition … for when the body is not kept moving the blood becomes tainted, its waste matter lodges in the skin, and the condition of the whole body deteriorates.

According to Agricola, at the mines in the Carpathian mountains, women have been known to marry seven times.

Standing even for a short time proves exhausting compared with walking and running though it be for a long time … Nature delights and is restored by alternating and varied actions.

When a doctor arrives to attend some patient of the working class, he ought not to feel his pulse the moment he enters, as is nearly always done without regard to the circumstances of the man who lies sick.

He should not remain standing while he considers what he ought to do, as though the fate of a human being were a mere trifle; rather let him condescend to sit down for awhile.

[I have seen] workers in whom certain morbid affections gradually arise from some particular posture of the limbs or unnatural movements of the body called for while they work.

Plants and minerals are bound to predestination. The faithful is only bound to the Divine orders.

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.

Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.