Morphological Substantiation in Vivo of Cancer of the Pleura in a Case of Asbestosis (1953)

This 1953 German article was a case report on one patient. He was a 62-year-old ship rigger referred to the State Hospital of Oldenburg at Sanderbusch, Germany, for radiation treatment of a suspected malignant tumor of the pleura, the lining of the chest. From 1920 to 1935 he had worked on insulation of pipes and valve systems at a naval dockyard. The author reported 22 years of asbestos exposure in total, most intense in the first 15 years. About two liters of fluid drained from his right chest contained tumor cells. X-rays could not confirm a pleural tumor, but asbestos bodies were found in his sputum. When the author looked inside the chest with a scope (thoracoscopy), two tumor nodules were seen. Tissue samples showed a malignant tumor, with asbestos bodies among the tumor cells. The pathologist wrote that the cells strongly indicated "pleural endothelioma". The cancer was proven 31 years after the patient began working with asbestos. The authors concluded that they regarded pleural cancer "almost with certainty" as a special form of asbestos-induced cancer.

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. 004277. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 2, "Cancer" and chapter 3, "Compensation: The Final Check-Up", of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (5th ed., 2005); see Reading Castleman.

We publish this piece 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.