Thomas Morison Legge


Sir Thomas Morison Legge CBE was a British physician who served as medical inspector to improve industrial hygiene.
Legge was born in Hong Kong, the son of Scottish Chinese-language scholar James Legge and his second wife, Hannah Mary Johnstone. He was educated at Magdalen College School and Trinity College, Oxford, earning a degree in medicine in 1886. He was the first Medical Inspector of Factories and Workshops in the United Kingdom, appointed in 1898 and resigning on 29 November 1926. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1918 and knighted in the 1925 New Year Honours. His work was especially concerned with anthrax and lead poisoning.
Legge's axioms, which he expounded in 1929, are "famous". They include the following:
  1. Unless and until the employer has done everything — and everything means a good deal — the workman can do next to nothing to protect himself although he is naturally willing enough to do his bit.
  2. If you can bring an influence to bear external to the workman, you will be successful; and if you can't or don't, you won't.
  3. Practically all industrial lead poisoning is due to the inhalation of dust and fumes; and if you stop their inhalation you will stop the poisoning.
  4. All workmen should be told something of the danger of the materials they come into contact with and not be left to find it out for themselves — sometimes at the cost of their lives.