[Henry Morley], ‘Letter from a Highly Respectable Old Lady’

Some one of you gentlemen has been a writing about Lucifer-matches. Lucifers, indeed! Is that your improvement of the people? Yah! If folks were wise they would send Lucifer his matches back, and not be indebted to him any longer for them. None of us ever lost our jawbones over a tinder-box in my young days. But you must have improvements. Don’t you know that you pay for civilisation with health. Look at me. I am eighty-two; but we used flint and steel when I was young. Turn to the British and Foreign Medical Review of a few years ago, there you will see what I mean. There’s an account in it, of the new disease begotten by lucifer-matches; by the phosphorus. It’s this: a worker in the manufactory has a hollow tooth, it generally begins there, resembles tooth-ache; then there is inflammation about it; the periosteum of the lower jaw becomes inflamed; the bone dies: a man is recorded to have picked his lower jawbone out of his chin as we pulled winkles out of their shells, when winkles were eaten, in the good old times. It’s true that forewarned is forearmed. Great care is taken in lucifer factories on a large scale; those who work over the phosphorus have their mouths shielded, I believe, and so on: but then, what a thing it is! Here’s your march of improvement! A new luxury, a new disease.