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Climbing Boys
Sweeps were bound as apprentices as young as four years. Parents
would take children to master sweepers and bind them over to the
highest bidder "as they cannot put them to apprenticeship to any
other master at so early an age." Shimmying himself up chimneys as
narrow as 9 inches square and as high as 60 feet, a sweep would
have to show his head or brandish his brush above the chimney pot
to prove he'd done his job. He dislodged the soot as he climbed,
emptying it into a bag. By the time he reached his teens, the
sweep "might find himself not only a bandy-legged hunchback, but
also a eunuch," the victim of a scrotal disease known as "chimneys
sweeper's cancer." Years of pressing knees against chimney walls
deformed his legs and played havoc with his knee caps, while the
ubiquitous soot brought inflammation of the eyes and skin
disease." - Reproduced with permission of McGraw-Hill Inc., from
The Illustrated Treasury of Medical Curiosa, by Art Newman,
Copyright 1988.
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