The JUNGLE

 ...There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scare a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person.  Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world [lead to his death]; all of the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one.  Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef boners and trimmer, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it.  The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or trace them.  They would have no nails, - they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a f an.  There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour.  There were the beef luggers, who carried two hundred pound quarters into the refrigerator cars, a fearful kind of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years…Source: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906