Author: WOOD, Kinder
Biography:
WOOD, Kinder (1785-1830: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 8 Feb. 1785 at St. Peter’s, Oldham, the son of humble parents--John Wood, a cotton twister, and his wife Sarah Nield, who had married at Prestwich in 1781. He was apprenticed to an Oldham surgeon in 1798, may have trained further or studied in London, but soon returned to Oldham. He married Ann Wroe (1788-1853) on 8 Aug. 1811 at St. Mary, Oldham. They had at least two sons and four daughters. At the time of his writing A Prospect of Manchester (1813), they were living at Chamber Hall on the outskirts of Manchester, but had moved to back to Oldham by 1815. In 1816 he had been practising for almost ten years and on 28 May gave evidence to a parliamentary Select Committee chaired by Sir Robert Peel on “the State of Children Employed in Manufactories.” He reluctantly but truthfully answered questions on conditions at his father-in-law’s large cotton mill at Hollinwood, revealing temperatures inside and incidence of accidents. His statement that nine- and ten-year-old children should not work more than twelve hours a day will not endear him to modern readers, but should be read in the context of his twenty pages of testimony. He was also the author of studies of the urethra (1808), caesarean section (1816), and idiotism and goitre (1824); he gave a lecture in 1830 on “Midwifery and the Diseases of Women and Children,” at the Manchester School of Medicine and Surgery. He died on 15 Dec. 1830 and was buried on 19 Dec. at St. Mary’s, Oldham. (ancestry.co.uk 22 Dec. 2022; Manchester Courier 18 Sept. 1830; Lancaster Gazette 24 Dec. 1830; Minutes of the Evidence before the Select Committee on the State of Children Employed in Manufactories [1816], 191-208) AA