The Harveian lecture on industrial fatigue : delivered before the Harveian Society of London on April 23rd, 1925 / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
1925?]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Harveian lecture on industrial fatigue : delivered before the Harveian Society of London on April 23rd, 1925 / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprinted from The L ncet ,Jf,ay2v4, ~T EL ‘ 19j4, P..905, f&Mt Har NATIONAL IN! U' \ ^ MY LKb Library itlTUL: ft INDUSTRIAL PSYCHOLOGY J3ECK STREET TOON*, UUIilU p ON INDUSTRIAL FATIGUE. Delivered before the Haroeian Society of London on April 23rd, 1925, By CHARLES S. MYERS, C.B.E., M.D., D.Sc. Camb., F.R.S., DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF INDUSTRIAL PS Y CHOLOG Y. For a member of the same College in Cambridge and of the same hospital in London as William Harvey, it is a special honour to be invited to give this address in his memory. Industrial fatigue must have existed in Harvey’s time, but under conditions so widely different from those now obtaining that it could not attract public attention and could not receive such scientific treatment as is possible to-day. Definition of Industrial Fatigue. I shall be expected at the outset to define precisely what is to be understood by industrial fatigue. It will be urged that since the ultimate aim of science is measurement, an exact knowledge of what it is that we are endeavouring to measure must be essential if our procedure is to be scientific. But do we not measure electricity despite our ignorance of its nature ? And may we not by statistical methods even measure a common factor affecting a number of different phenomena, without knowing anything whatever of the nature of that factor beyond the fact that it is a common determinant, among others, of those phenomena ? Two Groups of Tests. Assuredly the earliest workers on the subject of industrial fatigue did not concern themselves with its definition or with any careful inquiry into its nature. They set about devising tests which would reveal its presence. Those tests fall into two groups. The first group consist of brief tests of efficiency which were applied to the worker at different times of the day or week, and compared in regard to their results. Thus the average of two or three successive grips of the dynamometer was registered, first, say, in the early