Matchgirls and the Incredibly Gruesome Story of Phossy Jaw

In May 1855, a 16-year-old girl known to history only as Cornelia called at the office of New York surgeon James Rushmore Wood complaining of severe toothache and swelling in the right side of her lower jaw. Following standard procedure, Wood lanced Cornelia’s jaw, extracted a few teeth, and sent her on her way. But Cornelia’s condition only got worse. A large abscess opened in her jaw and began discharging large quantities of foul-smelling pus, and she soon became unable to chew solid food. When on December 17th she was admitted to Bellevue Hospital, Wood discovered to his horror that much of her right jaw had rotted away, the exposed bone dead and spongy. Stranger still, the bone glowed an eerie green in the dark. On January 19, 1856, Wood decided to operate, using a wire saw – and no anaesthetic – to cut away the diseased bone. But while the gums eventually healed, the left side of Cornelia’s jaw soon began to rot and ooze pus, forcing Wood to operate again on February 16th. Cornelia was sent home with a laudanum – a mixture of wine and opium – for the pain, and by February 23rd the swelling finally began to subside.

Cornelia would go on to make a full recovery, but many others were not so lucky. Like many young women of the age, Cornelia worked in a match factory, where so-called “Matchmaker’s Leprosy” or “Phossy Jaw” afflicted up to 11% of workers. Between the 1830s and 1910s, hundreds of match workers would fall victim to this horrifying industrial disease, suffering permanent disfigurement, insanity, or even death. It was an epidemic which would inspire massive labour movements and lay the groundwork for modern industrial hygiene and health and safety regulations. This is the story of how a now-ubiquitous household item changed the world.

Our story begins in 1669 with Hennig Brand, an alchemist from Hamburg who, like all alchemists at the time, sought to discover the Philosopher’s Stone, a legendary substance said to grant eternal life and turn base metals into gold. Believing its deep yellow colour to be somehow linked to gold, Brand collected and boiled down countless gallons of urine, yielding a sticky, pale-yellow paste. To his astonishment, this new substance gave off a pale green glow that never seemed to fade, and, when exposed to air, spontaneously burst into flames. Brand dubbed it phosphorus, from the Greek for “light bearing.” Phosphorus was the thirteenth chemical element discovered – and the first to be discovered in modern times.

Brand, however, soon lost interest in his discovery, and it was not until a decade later that a practical application for phosphorus was found. In 1680, Irish chemist Robert Boyle created the world’s first friction match, comprising a wooden splint tipped in sulphur which was drawn through a folded piece of paper coated in phosphorus, causing it to ignite. However, at the time phosphorus was too scarce and expensive for Boyle’s invention to be commercially viable, and it soon passed into obscurity.

It would be another century before a truly practical friction match was developed, transforming a world in which most fires were still lit using flint, steel, and tinder. In 1826, John Walker, an apothecary from Stockton-on-Tees, England, was attempting to develop a new explosive. One day, while stirring together a combination of antimony sulphide, potassium chlorate, gum, and starch, he noticed that a blob of this mixture had solidified on the end of his stir stick. He scraped the stick across the floor in order to dislodge the blob, whereupon it suddenly burst into flames. Walker soon began producing smaller versions to sell in his apothecary. But for reasons unknown, he never patented his invention, which in 1829 was copied by London businessman Samuel Jones and sold under the trade name Lucifers.

Lucifers proved wildly popular, and match factories began popping up across the British Isles, mainland Europe, and soon North America. The introduction of portable, reliable firelighting caused the popularity of tobacco smoking to skyrocket, starting a trend that would last nearly two centuries. However, early Lucifers were far from perfect, giving off such noxious fumes that early matchboxes bore the warning “If possible, avoid inhaling gas. Persons whose lungs are delicate should by no means use Lucifers.”

In 1830, French chemist Charles Sauria replaced the antimony sulphide in Walker’s original composition with white phosphorus, producing matches that were easier to ignite and produced less odour. This became the standard formulation for friction matches for nearly a century. However, the advantages of Sauria’s mixture came at a steep price as, it was soon discovered, white phosphorus was incredibly toxic. Reports abounded of babies dying after sucking on match heads, while a single box of matches yielded enough phosphorus to kill a grown man – a fact exploited in many a murder or suicide. But the worst fate was reserved for those who actually made the matches.

By the end of the 19th Century, there were 25 match-making factories across Britain, employing more than 4,000 people. The majority of these workers were women, 35% of whom were under the age of 18. While factory work in Victorian Britain was already grueling and poorly-paid, conditions in match factories were especially grim. Shifts could last up to 15 hours, while wages were low and varied according on the type of work performed. Those who filled frames with blank matchsticks and dipped them in match head composition were paid 1 shilling – around 8 pounds today – per 100 frames; those who cut the matchsticks to size received 2-3/4 pence per 432 boxes filled, while box packers received 1 shilling and 9 pence per 100 boxes. However, workers were lucky to take even these meagre amounts home, as they were subject to a whole host of punitive fines – for example, 3 pence for having dirty feet, having an untidy workbench, or talking; 5 pence for being late; 6 pence for dropping a tray of matches; and an entire shilling for having a burnt match on one’s workbench. The cutters and box packers also had to pay the boys who brought the finished frames from the drying ovens, and were expected to supply glue and brushes out of their own wages.

Worse still, the matchmakers worked in poorly ventilated factories with no protective equipment, exposing them to high levels of toxic phosphorus vapour. This toxic exposure could result in respiratory trouble or “phossy lung”; seizures or “phossy brain”; anemia or “phossy marrow”; and, finally, the dreaded bone necrosis known as “phossy jaw.”

The first known case of phossy jaw was recorded in 1838 by Austrian physician Wilhelm Lorinser. The patient, a female match worker, had been exposed to phosphorus vapours over a five-year period. In 1844, Lorinser recorded 22 cases of phossy jaw, and established the pathology of the condition. Phosphorus vapour, he deduced, entered the victim’s jaw through rotten teeth and other abscesses, whereupon it bound itself to the bone – which is largely composed of calcium phosphate – and poisoned it, forming porous, necrotic tissue known as sequestra. Symptoms usually appeared after 2-3 years of exposure, and the results could be ghastly, as a British surgical report from later in the century describes in vivid detail:

“The patient was a 35-year-old matchmaker who presented with great external swelling and in a debilitated state from inability to take solid food. Extending from ear to ear along the line of the jaw was a chain of ulcerated openings, from which there was profuse discharge and through any of which a probe could reach dead bone. Inside the mouth, the toothless alveolar process was seen bared of soft parts in its whole extent, the bone being rough and brownish-black. The gum gaped widely away from the dead jaw and had receded so as to leave it above the natural level of that bone, a probe could be passed easily either in front or behind the bone toward the sinuses of the neck. Under chloroform, the jaw was removed by dividing it at the symphysis and dragging the two halves out separately.”

Such radical surgery was, in many cases, absolutely necessary, for residual phosphorus in the bone would otherwise prevent the jaw and gums from healing, inevitably resulting in a slow and agonizing death from infection. Indeed, around 20% of those who suffered from phossy jaw eventually died of the condition. And even when surgery succeeded, victims often faced chronic pain, problems with eating and speaking, and the social consequences of disfigurement. In 1892, an exposé in the British newspaper The Star revealed that one London matchmaker forced one of its workers to quit after she came down with phossy jaw. While they continued to pay her wages while she recovered from her surgery, they and every other match factory refused to re-hire her, arguing that her appearance would frighten the other workers.

It is estimated that around 11% of match workers during this period were afflicted with phossy jaw. The condition became so common that as early as 1852, Charles Dickens penned an article titled One of the Evils of Matchmaking decrying the industry’s practices and their horrific health effects. However, as Dickens also noted, some factories did implement safety measures to mitigate phosphorus toxicity, such as improving ventilation on the factory floor and making match dippers wear sponges soaked in alkaline solution over their mouths and noses. But such practices were far from universal, and the scourge of phossy jaw carried on unabated. What makes this especially tragic is that a discovery had been made just a few years earlier which could have single-handedly ended the epidemic. In 1847, Austrian chemist Anton von Schrötter announced the discovery of red phosphorus, a form of the element that was far less toxic and easily absorbed than regular white phosphorus. Unfortunately, it was more expensive to produce and ignited at a higher temperature, so most manufacturers refused to switch over.

Eventually, several nations recognized the danger of white phosphorus and banned its use in matchmaking, starting with the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1872. And in 1892, Germany, Norway, and Sweden passed regulations mandating adequate ventilation in match factories and requiring workers to rinse their hands and mouths at the end of their shifts. However, it would take a historic labour movement for such laws to be adopted in Britain.

The movement against the British match industry began on June 23, 1888 when social activists Annie Besant and Herbert Burrows published an exposé titled White Slavery in London in her weekly newspaper The Link. The article focused on London match company Bryant & May, whose business practices epitomized the abuses and excesses of the industry:

“Mr. Theodore Bryant, to show his admiration of [former Prime Minister William] Gladstone and the greatness of his own public spirit, bethought him to erect a statue to that eminent statesman. In order that his workgirls might have the privilege of contributing, he stopped 1s. each out of their wages, and further deprived them of half-a-day’s work by closing the factory, “giving them a holiday”. (“We don’t want no holidays”, said one of the girls pathetically, for – needless to say – the poorer employees of such a firm lose their wages when a holiday is “given”.) So furious were the girls at this cruel plundering, that many went to the unveiling of the statue with stones and bricks in their pockets, and I was conscious of a wish that some of those bricks had made an impression on Mr. Bryant’s – conscience. Later they surrounded the statue – “we paid for it” they cried savagely – shouting and yelling, and a gruesome story is told that some cut their arms and let their blood trickle on the marble paid for, in very truth, by their blood. There seems to be a curious feeling that the nominal wages are 1s. higher than the money paid, but that 1s. a week is still kept back to pay for the statue and for a fountain erected by the same Mr. Bryant.”

In response, the Bryant & May management tried to force their workforce to sign a paper contradicting Besant and Burrows’s article. When certain workers refused to sign, they were immediately dismissed, prompting 1400 women to walk off the job. The Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888 had begun.

While the company offered to reinstate the fired employees, the strikers soon demanded further concessions, including an end to punitive fines. A strike committee including trade unionist Sarah Chapman met with the company management, but when they refused to budge, the strikers turned to Annie Besant for help. Aided by Besant’s activism, the strike gained significant publicity and support across Britain. On July 11, a delegation of strikers met with three British MPs, while Liberal MP Charles Bradlaugh spoke in support of the strike in Parliament. While Bryant & May initially stood firm, factory owner William Bryant, himself a prominent Liberal supporter, eventually caved to public pressure. On July 16, the strike committee, led by Besant, hammered out the workers’ demands. Punitive fines and deductions were to be abolished; workers would be able to take grievances directly to the management rather than going through the foremen; and, finally, lunches were to be eaten in a separate room to prevent the food from being contaminated by phosphorus. Bryant & May accepted the concessions, and the strike came to an end. Shortly thereafter, the workers formed the Union of Women Matchmakers – at the time the largest union of women and girls in Britain.

Yet despite the strike’s success, the use of white phosphorus in matches persisted, and match workers continued to suffer from phossy jaw. In 1891, Parliament passed regulation requiring match companies to inform the government of any cases of phossy jaw among their workers. Unfortunately, these regulations were poorly enforced, allowing many cases to go unreported. In 1894, Bryant & May were fined for failing to report 17 cases of phossy jaw. However, the fine amounted to only £25, and the abuses continued.

But if regulation couldn’t end the use of white phosphorus, then perhaps competition could. In 1891, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, opened his own match factory, which used safer red phosphorus and paid its workers better wages. Salvation Army matches were advertised as “Lights in Darkest England”, their labels assuring buyers that they were “manufactured under healthy conditions” and were “entirely free from the phosphorus which causes Matchmaker’s Leprosy.” The venture was initially successful, with many retailers and consumers caving to the pressure to boycott white phosphorus matches. Unfortunately, the use of red phosphorus made Salvation Army matches three times more expensive than white phosphorus matches, and despite significantly lowering production costs through automation, the organization struggled to remain competitive. The factory finally closed in 1900, and the following year was taken over by Bryant & May.

By this time, however, the company had finally stopped using white phosphorus – not because of any regulation or social movement, but rather the discovery of phosphorus sesquisulfide, a compound as cheap and effective as white phosphorus but far less toxic. In 1911, the American Diamond Match Company independently developed the same formulated but, in a widely-praised move, forfeited patent rights in to allow competitors to produce safety matches and drive white phosphorus off the market. At the same time, government regulation finally caught up with the industry. In 1906, Finland, Denmark, France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Italy, The Netherlands, and Germany signed the Berne Convention banning the use of white phosphorus in matches – one of the first international bans on an industrial product to be enacted. This was followed in 1908 by the White Phosphorus Matches Prohibition Act in Britain and in 1912 by the White Phosphorus Act in the United States.

The 1888 Matchgirls’ Strike not only paved the way for the banning of phosphorus matches, but also sparked a wider movement that led to the passing of countless labour laws and the rise of the UK Labour Party. Today, all friction matches use red phosphorus and cases of phossy jaw and phosphorus poisoning are relatively rare, seen mainly in those who regularly handle certain fertilizers and incendiary weapons. Cases have also been reported in those taking medications containing bisphosphonates, compounds used – ironically – to treat osteoporosis. But the closest modern parallel to the phossy jaw epidemic is the case of the Radium Girls of the 1910s and 1920s who painted glowing, radioactive dials on clocks and watches and suffered similarly gruesome deaths and disfigurements – and to learn more about this horrifying tale, please check out our previous video Glowing in the Dark – the Radium Girls.

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