Asbestos (1957)

This is a three-page entry on asbestos from the 1957 second edition of the textbook Industrial Toxicology, by L.T. Fairhall. It is not an original study. The author summarized existing knowledge and earlier published work. The entry described the types of asbestos and their industrial uses. It reported United States consumption in 1951 as 796,992 short tons and said that in 1944 the largest single outlet for asbestos in manufactured products was clutch facings. It stated that inhaling asbestos dust produces asbestosis, an interstitial pulmonary fibrosis whose X-ray shadows resemble ground glass. Citing other investigators, the author reported three findings. Lynch and Cannon, studying 40 cases of asbestosis at necropsy, found support for the belief that fibrosis does not progress indefinitely after exposure stops. Cartier found asbestosis only in workers employed at least 14 years and exposed to air containing at least 5 million fibrous particles, 10 to 250 microns long, per cubic foot. Doll concluded from 105 necropsies of people employed at an asbestos works that lung cancer is a specific hazard of asbestos workers. The scanned text was badly scrambled.

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. 002609. 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.