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Contemporaneous with the creation of the Panama Canal, was the Panama Railroad. During construction, estimates put the death toll, due to accidents and tropical disease, as hight 82,000.

At the peak, there were 500 deaths per week. To dispose of the corpses, The Panama Railroad Company, put the bodies in barrels, pickled them and sold them to medical schools.

For a period, that was the company’s main source of income.
The building of Britain’s railways was similarly brutal. At Tebay in Cumbria there was a typhoid outbreak. Bodies were disposed of in lime pits, sometimes while they were still alive.
There is a book “Navvy” which gives an account of the brutality. The navvies were paid in tokens which could only be redeemed at the company shop where rotten meat and infested flour were the norm. This eventually gave the motive for the Truck Acts which decreed that workers had to be paid in coin of the realm.
 

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