Dr. Paul Gross to Dr. Kenneth W. Smith on the Case of Harold Browner (1958)

A six-page memorandum of September 11, 1958, from Dr. Paul Gross, research pathologist, to Dr. Kenneth W. Smith, Johns-Manville's medical director, on "Case of Harold Browner, Pittsburg, California Plant." Gross studied three slides of lung tissue sent from Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley. He diagnosed bronchiectatic cysts of the lung, probably infectious and allergic in origin, a "Pneumoconiosis, minimal, non-fibrogenic," and a single small granuloma, and he ruled out dust as the cause of the cysts. Bodies that looked like asbestos bodies he classed as "pseudo-asbestos bodies" of the kind seen with talc and other dusts.

What it shows

Gross closed with a sharp comment on a report by a Dr. Crenshaw: a mineral analysis of the lung tissue done at the University of California Hospital was "incomprehensible," and if it measured only total silica, "all conclusions based on the analysis are worthless." "As they stand now," he wrote, "the figures given are meaningless." The memo shows J-M's medical director sending a plant worker's tissue to an outside pathologist and receiving a reading that found little dust disease. Hand-written marks show it was later an exhibit at Dr. Daniel Braun's 1981 deposition.