Historical and Legal Aspects of Industrial Disease (1975)

This four-page book chapter is a historical and legal overview of occupational disease, not a research study, and reports no new data. The author traced the first recognition of dust as a hazard to central European gold and silver mines, citing Agricola's De re metallica (1556), which described mine dust entering the lungs and causing difficulty in breathing. The chapter stated that it was through the efforts of Ramazzini, whose treatise was published in 1700, that the question "What is your job?" became part of any medical history. It described Sheffield cutlery workers dying of silicosis after as little as five years' exposure. It also described nineteenth-century employer defenses that meant injured workers rarely won lawsuits, and the arrival of workmen's compensation in Britain and the United States between 1890 and 1920. It noted that in certain US states only 50 per cent of workers were covered. It also noted that over four hundred Gauley Bridge tunnel workers were reported to have died of acute silicosis in 1932-1934, none receiving compensation. Asbestos appeared only once, as a recently described hazard. The author concluded that recognizing new hazards will depend on asking "What is your job?"

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. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry.

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.