Fibrous Silicates (in Price's Textbook of the Practice of Medicine, section on the pneumoconioses) (1956)

This is a section of a medical textbook, dated 1956 in its citation, not a research study. It described lung effects of asbestos, talc and sillimanite, said sericite had been suggested as a cause of lung disease without justification, and gave figures without citing sources. Asbestos was described as fibrous silicates of magnesium and iron, and Canada was said to produce 65 per cent of the world's asbestos. It stated that asbestosis can follow any process in the British industry, with the risk greatest in crushing, disintegrating, carding and card cleaning, where there is most dust. It gave the average length of exposure before symptoms began as 7 years and named breathlessness as the most conspicuous symptom. It stated that death may occur within 5 years of symptom onset and that carcinoma develops in more than 10 per cent of cases, without naming its type. Treatment was described as symptomatic only. The text said British legislation had controlled the disease so effectively that, with few exceptions, newly diagnosed cases had work histories going back before 1931.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. J-M listed it in its medical library index as no. 001846. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 2, "Cancer", of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (5th ed., 2005); see Reading Castleman.

We publish pages from a book for research and commentary: it shows what the medical literature in a leading asbestos company's own library said on the subject, and when. Our summary above is our own reading of it. The copyright stays with the publisher.