Dr. Paul Gross to Dr. Kenneth W. Smith Sending His Final Report on Garfield Goins (1964)

A covering letter of October 16, 1964, from Dr. Paul Gross, now director of the research laboratory of the Industrial Hygiene Foundation of America, to Dr. Kenneth W. Smith, Johns-Manville's medical director, enclosing three copies of his report on "Examination of Slides from an Autopsy on the Body of Garfield Goins" with photomicrographs and an invoice ($366). A copy went to Jack Fritz. Goins was a former J-M Rigid Shingles Department worker whose widow had claimed that his job caused his tuberculosis.

What it shows

The enclosed report (not shown here) left any dust disease out of its diagnoses. Gross found only "very few asbestos bodies" and argued that a few asbestos bodies mean little, since they had been found in about 30 per cent of hospital deaths in Capetown and in "46% of 100 consecutive adult autopsies" in Pittsburgh. He concluded that the claim that Goins's tuberculosis "was aggravated by his occupational exposure to dust has no experimental or clinical support," because a dust disease must be present to affect tuberculosis. The case began with J-M's letter of May 1, 1964; Gross's earlier view is in his letter of May 15.

About this copy

The file also holds the 10-page report itself, which quotes the hospital's autopsy diagnosis and describes the slides. Under the Library's privacy rule (no autopsy reports), those pages (2-11) are left out; only the covering letter is shown.