Fig. 26.—Aged field labourer.
Fig. 27. Fig. 28.
Attitude of woman working in the rice fields as seen from the right and left sides.
Fig. 29.—A gang of eight workers in the rice fields.
Consider the postures that miners must endure, or as Pieraccini phrases it, their "disastrous attitudes."
The transport galleries are ordinarily too low to permit a man of average height to walk erect; along these galleries little transport-wagons are run by hand, excepting where the carrying is done on the backs of the men themselves.
"Even in the front of the advance tunnels and in the galleries that are being worked, miners are to be seen in the most incongruous attitudes. These anomalous positions of the body maintained throughout long hours of toil react upon the functional action of the heart and lungs, upon the stomach and intestines in the proper performance of their tasks, and result in producing hernia, varicose veins and eventually deformities of the skeleton (vertebral column, thorax)."[20]