Of the butchers and floormen, the beef boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death scarce a one of these had not some spot of horror on his person.

And the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of them about on his own persongenerally he had only to hold out his hand. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing plants with Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the things that were made out of the carcasses of animals and of all the lesser industries that were maintained there now he found that each one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killing-beds, the source and fountain of them all. There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might have gathered in Packingtownthose of the various afflictions of the workers.

The jungle 1906 upton sinclair