Early History of Health Insurance in America

Pennsylvania in the late 1800s and early 1900s was an unsafe place to work, with a quarter-million recorded industrial calamities a year. So dangerous were the trades, and so gruesome were the accidents, that the chronicling of injuries suffered by workers became its own muckraking genre. A short-lived publication of the Inter­national Association of Factory Inspectors got some its best stories from the steel industry: In one nightmare narrative, an explosion at a Butler County steel mill forced “streams of hot metal [down] on the workmen, engulfing and literally cooking some of them.” Some accounts weren’t as spectacular, but merely ghastly — arms jerked from sockets, regular decapitations, and sawmill accidents with all of the attendant gore and sinew you would expect. In 1907, writer
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