Woolsorters' disease was a major concern in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bradford. Woolworkers in Bradford are recorded to have first suffered from the disease between 1838 and 1847 and then with increasing publicity from the late 1870s. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, the disease was determined to be a pulmonary form of anthrax that was introduced into the wool trade through imported wool from the East. By 1860, imports of wool had overtaken home-grown wool. These imports may have led to the disproportion- ate dread of anthrax as a result of its association with the dangers of the East, similar to the fears of Asiatic cholera which came in waves from the East during the nineteenth century. Despite the rarity of the disease, anthrax's frightening and sudden attack on the body may also have led to this fear.

In its respiratory form, anthrax is shocking, as symptoms develop so quickly that it can kill before the disease has been diagnosed. Inhalation of spores was the form of transmission which killed most of the wool workers who succumbed to anthrax in Bradford. Cutaneous anthrax is also a very dramatic but visible form of the disease. Presenting with black pustules, it usually requires a scratch in the skin through which the bacilli can enter.