Early Scientific and Medical Literature
The earliest historical record of asbestos hazards dates back to the time of Christ. In modern times, as early as 1897 a Vienna physician noted that emaciation and pulmonary problems in asbestos weavers and their families left no doubt that the cause was asbestos inhalation. Also prior to the 1900s, women factory inspectors in Great Britain gave special attention to asbestos manufacturing processes because of known cases of lung damage among asbestos workers.
In 1906, Dr. H. Montague Murray reported a fatal case of asbestosis to a British Parliamentary committee on compensation. Dr. Murray’s patient had worked in the carding room of an asbestos textile plant and had died at the age of 33. The doctor attributed his patient’s death to lung damage caused by asbestos dust. This case is generally regarded as the first modern-day “proven” case of pulmonary disease from asbestos.
Not long after Dr. Murray’s report, the first detailed case report of asbestosis appearing in medical literature was authored by the British pathologist W.E. Cooke in 1924. The subject of Dr. Cook’s case report was the now famous Nellie Kershaw, who had worked for Turner Brothers Asbestos Company from the age of 13 through the age of 26, and intermittently thereafter, until she was totally disabled at the age of 31. Ms. Kershaw’s disability from asbestos exposure eventually caused her death. Dr. Cooke named the disease that killed her “pulmonary asbestosis.”
In 1930, Drs. E.R.A. Merewether and C.W. Price authored an historic report detailing their investigation of working conditions in Great Britain’s asbestos industry. Their recommendations included the control of exposure to dust in asbestos operations and regular medical examinations of plant workers. They also stressed the importance of worker education about the dangers of working with and around asbestos.
The attention the British paid asbestos hazards in 1930 also led to considerable attention to the problem in the United States. Around this same time, the first case reports of asbestosis in the United States were being widely published. Dr. Merewether’s findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association -- the most widely read medical journal in the United States -- in June 1930. Soon, other articles and medical case reports about asbestosis appeared in the journal.
These revelations about asbestos-related lung conditions were not limited to the U.S. and Great Britain. The International Labor Office (ILO) held an international conference on dust diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1930. This was the first of several major conferences held by the ILO, involving experts on dust-related lung diseases from all over the world.
Thus, by 1930, widespread knowledge of the hazards of asbestos was widely available to all companies and industries. From this point forward, the information these companies received about the dangers of asbestos from published medical and scientific literature grew exponentially.
