“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 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.

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

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.

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.

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

In antiquity the sage kings recognized that men’s nature is bad and that their tendencies were not being corrected and their lawlessness controlled.

I beg you, reject antiquity, tradition, faith, and authority! Let us begin anew by doubting everything we assume has been proven!

A dogma recognized throughout antiquity… (that) the soul expiates its sins in the darkness of the infernal regions and… afterwards… passes into new bodies, there to undergo new trials.

All those things that are now field to be of the greatest antiquity were at one time new; what we to-day hold up by example will rank hereafter as precedent.