Dr. G. W. H. Schepers of Saranac Laboratory, Medico-Legal Opinion on W. E. Taylor (1956)

A "Medico-Legal Opinion in respect of Occupational Chest Disease" of November 5, 1956, by Dr. G. W. H. Schepers, director of the Saranac Laboratory, on W. E. Taylor, who died in June 1953, prepared for the Pasco, Washington, law firm of Olson and Olson. Schepers reviewed a dust study, an asbestos identification, the employment record, the autopsy protocol, eight chest X-rays and two tissue slides. He listed about five and a half years of work as an asbestos mechanic between 1943 and 1952, at the Vancouver, Washington, shipyards and later at North Richland, where a staged test put the dust at 85% magnesia and 15% amosite. He concluded that "the asbestosis was a material factor in the cause of disability and death," and that it "is rather patently a process of long standing."

What it shows

Schepers read the X-ray series as "compatible with a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis, probably asbestosis with associated emphysema and cor pulmonale," already detectable on the first film of October 1948. Because the disease was visible that early, and because he found two kinds of asbestos bodies, he held that "the main disease must have resulted from the earlier exposure" in the wartime shipyards, and that the fatal outcome "could have resulted from the earlier period of exposure whether or not the deceased was exposed further." That answered the question the employer's lawyers had put in their letter of October 18. The last page is the laboratory's $75 invoice to the firm for the opinion. Schepers, the laboratory's director, was doing paid medico-legal work for an employer's side in a compensation claim.

About this copy

Page 4 of the file is a misaligned double scan that shows parts of the clinical history and a list of the autopsy findings; it is left out. The copy also lacks the pages carrying most of sections III, IV and VI of the opinion.