Dr. Charles U. Culmer of J-M's Waukegan Plant to Dr. Paul Gross on Harry Dever's Medical History (1959)

A two-page letter of January 7, 1959, from Dr. Charles U. Culmer of the medical department at Johns-Manville Products Corporation's Waukegan, Illinois, plants to Dr. Paul Gross, research pathologist at the Industrial Hygiene Foundation in Pittsburgh. At the request of Dr. Kenneth W. Smith, J-M's medical director, Culmer was sending tissue from the autopsy on Harry Dever, a retired Waukegan worker who died on October 11, 1958, with the plant's chest X-rays. He summarized Dever's plant medical record: X-ray signs of pneumoconiosis "in an early stage" on a 1949 film, after which "the pneumoconiosis progressed"; tuberculosis treated in 1953 and 1954; and retirement for disability recommended in April 1958 with the diagnosis "Pneumoconiosis, stage 2, progressing."

What it shows

After his tuberculosis treatment Dever was "returned to light work in as nearly a dust-free atmosphere as possible." The sanatorium's medical director recalled that he died of heart failure, "probably on the basis of a cor pulmonale," with no sign that the tuberculosis had returned. Gross's findings are in his report of May 15, 1959.