Hazards of the job: from industrial disease to environmental health science

Occupational health-or "industrial hygiene", as it was known in the early. twentieth century-has hardly figured in most accounts of the workplace. Business historians are mostly management oriented; medical and social historians have yet to give the subject the attention it deserves. Christopher Sellers' book is therefore particularly welcome. It traces the history of industrial hygiene in America from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the late 1940s, a period which also saw industrial hygiene switch its interests from industrial disease to wider environmental problems. To provide an insight into the status of occupational health in the late nineteenth century, Christopher Sellers begins by describing events at the Chicago Exhibition of 1893, where the 'Hygiene of the Workshop and Factory Exhibit' was virtually nonexistent. It proved an appropriate symbol, as the organizers had decided to coat the buildings with tons of white lead paint-a long-recognized poison-which had predictable health effects on the painters. The example of lead is used throughout the book as a theme to highlight the development of industrial hygiene. In the 1890s, American occupational medicine was backward, government regulation lacking, and industrialists avoided liability for any health problems. In the Progressive era before 1914, social scientists and labour organizations-notably the American Association for Labor Legislationtargeted with some success known industrial diseases, such as the "phossy jaw" of the matchmakers. The investigatory strategy of social scientists and the networks they created paved the way for the first industrial hygienists. These included Alice Hamilton, a physician for the US Bureau of Labor, who was a key figure in establishing occupational disease research. Although industrialists were persuaded rather than compelled by Hamilton and others, by 1914 occupational health had become a marked function of the state. The baton of occupational health research was picked up during the war years by the Public Health Service (PHS), by which time state legislatures were drafting compensation laws, thus raising the spectre of liability for errant industrialists. This in turn stimulated the hiring of company physicians, a trend which continued after 1918. In the inter-war period a reaction occurred. The studies of the PHS were attacked by industry, especially those that focused too narrowly on the workplace. Leading health researchers now put their faith in a more scientific approach, in which health hazards were examined primarily in the laboratory. By the 1920s, Harvard scientists had become the leaders in industrial hygiene research. The emphasis was on pure research, usually led by upperand middle-class individuals who took no interest in politics and industry, yet had their work funded by businessmen. Not surprisingly, the era saw a marked convergence between scientists and industrialists, with industrial hygienists operating as a testing laboratory for toxic substances so that business could reassure the public of the safety of its products. In the depression and its aftermath, these scientists used the knowledge that they had acquired through occupational health to address wider environmental concerns such as air pollution. It signified a move in state resources and attention away from industrial health narrowly defined, a trend that was not halted until the 1970s. Christopher Sellers' text is densely argued (with the endnotes occupying nearly a quarter