Occupational Hazards: My mother the shoemaker...

My mother was a nurse for most of my life, until she retired. Except at one point when I was a kid, out of frustration with some aspect of the nursing trade, she went to work in a local shoe factory. More than anything, I remember the smell of the glue on her clothing when she came home.

And you thought my grandfathers were my only link to the trades...

It's probably just as well that I did not know at the time about n-hexane polyneuropathy, an occupational disease endemic to these shoe factories brought on by exposure to the very glue that I remember so well. Thankfully, factory life didn't agree with her and she went back to nursing in pretty short order.

Nursing has its own hazards, just as sitting at a desk typing does, but occupational diseases are not a modern invention. Our repetitive strain disorders and bad backs and neuropathies born of the chemical age are nothing new. N-hexane polyneuropathy is just the modern equivalent of an 18th century disease known as 'shoemaker's colic'. Hatters were famously driven mad by the mercury they used, and so on and so forth...

Something we should probably talk about more often is the occupational hazards of the artisan life.

To get a bit nearer our period, let us wander off to Jamestown and take a gander at some scary-looking femurs that bear the marks of a lifetime of cobblers using their upper legs to pound on.  In the image at the right, you can get a glimpse inside a 16th century shoemaker's workshop from my old nemesis Jost Amman.

Note the way the two men in the foreground are working with the shoe on their thigh. The strap you can see holding the shoe in place, running under the heel of the bloke on the left is the shoemaker's stirrup I described last Sunday.

Image from the Jamestown.org

website's "Written in Bone: 

Forensic Files of the 17th 

Century Chesapeake" exhibit. 

Jost's guys are sewing, but hammers were also used to condense and work-harden leather, especially soles, and if you do that on your leg for a lifetime, your body is going to defend you from the damage. When you damage a bone, it repairs itself -- damage it enough repeatedly over a long enough period and your body will adapt, build up extra bone to protect itself from the next blow. Eventually, the layers of bone will build up and you end up with a sort of anvil attached to your femur.

Do me and yourself a favor: learn from their mistake.

It would make sense, in a way, for this to be more common for cobblers than cordwainers since sole repairs would've fallen to the cobbler. Though I should note that the Jamestown website doesn't draw a distinction between the two, and on the frontier there might not have been one.  On the muddy reaches of the Virginia coast, I would think that pounding hobnails into soles was a more common task than not.

A bone spur like that must've leant itself to one hell of a limp.

It's a cobbler's life, I guess.

Not all occupational markers are skeletal or so terribly painful. Bakers and blacksmiths have burns, which would theoretically heal and leave your skin all the more impervious to future burns. As I mentioned, the scars and bone spurs were the result of the body's attempts to protect itself.

On a side note, when I'm watching TV shows like NCIS or Bones, when they confidently describe the working lives of the men and women whose skeletons they're examining, I often wonder how hobbyists throw wrenches into the works on such occasions. I may be a writer, but I have several that might confuse a forensics team if I ever ended up on the table in an episode of Bones. My left incisor has been worn down years of cutting thread with it and I have a shoulder thing that's the result of a stint as a stockman at WalMart* in my youth preceded by a couple years in the pressroom of a local publisher. Compound that by all the adventures this project have led me on and I have to wonder what the CSI folks would make of my body.

That might seem a bit macabre, but ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Food for thought anyway.

~ Scott

------
* You know that thing you hear about where Wally World comes to town and before you know it they're the only game in town? Yeah.

Failure at my fingertips: Thimble making is harder than it looks...

First of all, from one time traveler to another, happy 79th birthday to Tom Baker, better known to some as the 4th Doctor and to many as "That British guy with the hat and the crazy scarf..."

Aside from being my first Doctor, he was also a gifted Shakespearean actor and a member of Sir Laurence Olivier's company. I'd give anything to see him play Lear. Regardless of all that, to me and millions of others, he's the mad man in the blue box.

From the other crazy hat/scarf guy getting himself lost in the time stream, many, many more happy years, sir.
Seriously, folks. If you didn't realize I was geek by now, you just haven't been paying close enough attention.

It's time to talk about finger helmets.

I experienced the first abject failure of the project today. I was attempting to make thimbles based on the Jost Amman illustration of the thimble maker from his Book of Trades. I've reproduced the tools in the etching using hardwood, but the brass keeps tearing out at the bottom of the die.

"Der Fingerhueter", from Das Ständebuch by Jost Amman

Boom. Failure.

Is it that modern brass is softer than what these chaps are using? Do I need a thicker gauge? Should I make the dapping block out of iron instead of hardwood?

A book on the history of trumpet making (of all things) includes an aside on the above image, and some information on the making of thimbles, because it relates to the valves of the trumpet. The author proposes that the brass was 1 mm thick, which is roughly twice the thickness of the brass I've been using.

Ah well. Better luck tomorrow.

In the meantime, it is time to start multi-tasking or I'll never make it.  A least not with out cloning myself and the Calvin & Hobbes trick with the cardboard box didn't work. Might've needed more tigers.

Thankfully, while I was failing miserably at the fine art of thimbling, the books on coopering arrived from England. So, after I gave up on making finger helmets, I spent some time knocking together a shaving horse.

Here's a video for going on with. It's done by Kari Hultman, who is the woodworker behind the fantastic "Village Carpenter" blog. It's an extended interview and demonstration of coopering at Colonial Williamsburg, including the shaving horse I'm working on...

Here's to a more successful day tomorrow!

~Scott

Ramona Vogel: Journeyman Cooper at Colonial Williamsburg from Kari Hultman on Vimeo.