Mill Fever - it wasn't always like this.

From Vermont History; A fever spread rapidly across Vermont and the states nearby in the years between 1820 and 1850. People called it "mill fever," but it was not an illness. It was a wave of excitement brought on by advertisements for "active and healthy girls" to work in the cotton mills of southern New England. Hundreds of young women left their families and farms to seek their fortunes in milltowns like Lowell and Chicopee, Massachusetts.

From American Heritage; In the 1830s and 1840s, the so-called mill girls who flocked to the mushrooming textile cities of New England were widely taken as one of the wonders of the New World. European travel writers invariably put Lowell on their list of must-visits, alongside an Indian encampment, a slave plantation, and Niagara Falls. Up close, the mill girls were impressive specimens of what seemed a new kind of woman. “Few British gentlemen,” wrote Scottish visitor Patrick Shirreff, after standing among a throng of young women in bonnets pouring from a Lowell cotton mill in 1835, “need have been ashamed of leading any one of them to a tea-party.”

By 1910, when Lewis Hine published his indelible photograph of a grimy 12-year-old factory worker standing barefoot in a Vermont mill, the New England textile industry had long ago stopped being a tourist mecca. Two years later the bloody “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, doomed the industry’s image once and for all. It was easy to forget how cotton had once seemed like a godsend to rural New England, and especially to the region’s young women.

However, there was also a physical disease.

From Wikipedia; Byssinosis, also called "brown lung disease" or "Monday fever", is an occupational lung disease caused by exposure to cotton dust in inadequately ventilated working environments. Byssinosis commonly occurs in workers who are employed in yarn and fabric manufacture industries. It is now thought that the cotton dust directly causes the disease. This disease often occurred in the times of the industrial revolution. Most commonly young girls working in mills or other textile factories would be afflicted with this disease. Symptoms; breathing difficulties, chest tightness, wheezing, cough. Byssinosis can ultimately result in narrowing of the airways, lung scarring and death from infection or respiratory failure. The term "brown lung" is a misnomer, as the lungs of affected individuals are not brown.

And it's Goodbye, Monday blues
Goodbye, card room fever
Cotton dust has got my lungs
You know I'm bound to leave you

Si Kahn