Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the On-Going Struggle to Protect Workers' Health

by David Rosner, Gerald E. Markowitz

During the Depression, silicosis, an industrial lung disease, emerged as a national social crisis. Experts estimated that hundreds of thousands of workers were at risk of disease, disability, and death by inhaling silica in mines, foundries, and quarries. By the 1950s, however, silicosis was nearly forgotten by the media and health professionals. Asking what makes a health threat a public issue, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz examine how a culture defines disease and how disease itself is understood at different moments in history. They also explore the interlocking relationships of public health, labor, business, and government to discuss who should assume responsibility for occupational disease.
Back Cover

 
“If there is a paradigmatic tale of occupational health . . . Deadly Dust is it.”
—James L. Weeks, Science
 
“Rosner and Markowitz have produced a carefully crafted history of the rise and fall of this occupational disease, focusing especially on the political forces behind changing disease definitions. . . Deadly Dust comes as a fresh breeze into one of the more stuffy and too often ignored alleys of medical history.”
—Robert N. Proctor, The Journal of the American Medical Association
 
“A thought-provoking, densely referenced, uncompromising history. . . Like all good history, it challenges our basic assumptions about how the world is ordered and offers both factual information and a conceptual framework for rethinking what we ‘know’.”
—Rosemary K. Sokas, The New England Journal of Medicine
Back Cover continued
“Deadly Dust raises an important methodological problem that has long gone underarticulated in medical historical circles: how can social historians of medicine offer political or economic explanations for the scientific efforts of their professional subjects without losing a grip on the biological aspects of disease?”
—Christopher Sellers, The Journal of the History of Medicine
 
"A sophisticated understanding of how class and conflict shape social, economic, political, and intellectual change underlies this first attempt at a history of occupational health spanning the twentieth century."
—Claudia Clark, The Journal of American History%; FONT-FAMILY: Arial" 
"This volume is well worth reading as a significant contribution to American social history."
—Charles O. Jackson, The American Historical Review
 
David Rosner is Distinguished Professor of History and Sociomedical Sciences, and Director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Columbia University.
 
Gerald Markowitz is Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1991

Reviews

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars: I read this as part of a research project on organized labor responses to occupational health hazards, particularly chronic diseases and conditions, and it's definitely a helpful and appropriately dense book. Every bit of information included supports the authors' arguments, and they balance considerations of science, policy, historical context, and interest groups' motives well. I do strongly agree with another review that "...the voices of patients and rank-and-file workers are almost completely absent," which could have uplifted the more summarized or theoretical parts of the narrative, especially when silicosis's impact on workers' lives was at the ultimate heart of the book.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am fascinated by early 20th century industrial health and hygiene-- I know, it's hardly the kind of thing you can imagine getting wound up about. That said, it's really an ideal topic in which to explore issues of the social construction of illness, chronic v. acute illness, labor, power, greed, health, and welfare. Here, there are actual conflicts over these issues: violent strikes, angry pamphlets, work stopages! It really is exciting. Rosner and Markowitz's book has some of this excitement. They focuses on silicosis, a somewhat forgotten dust disease that impacted men working in metal mines, rock quarries, and granite finishers from roughly 1900-1950. Three themes animate the book: the difficulty in dealing with chronic diseases that may have links to industry; how different languages (e.g. labor, engineer, business) defined the disease; and the tactics used to achieve or prevent silicosis being defined as an industrial disease.

Rosner and Markowitz are particularly interested in the multiple stakeholders involved in defining silicosis as a disease covered by workers' comp laws. Thus, they begin by describing the biology of silicosis (essentially the inhalation of miniscule particles of silica) and then moving on to how technicians, industrial leaders, and workers each interpreted the same set of evidence. They emphasize that silicosis peaked as a public interest during the Depression. After World War II, it gave way to either a) other dust diseases like black lung and brown lung or 2) was simply relegated to the past. A relic of a time before safety inspection and engineering corrected the problem.

While the content of "Deadly Dust" is excellent, I found that the text lacked much of what makes industrial health so fascinating a topic. For example, the voices of patients and rank-and-file workers are almost completely absent. The prose, while clear, was dry and lacked the energy that I appreciate in authors writing about the labor movement. It's an excellent introduction to silicosis and the early occupational health movement, but casual readers should be warned that it is not a light read.