Hazards of the Job : from Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science

The second half of the nineteenth-century in the United States was a period of rapid and unwieldy industrial expansion. As the technological developments and economic opportunities presented to capitalists dominated American society, the adverse side effects that they inevitably caused were left unquestioned. One such negative impact of industrialization was the proliferation of"industdal disease," maladies and sicknesses attributed to workplace conditions which posed heretofore unknown hazards to the human body. Christopher C. Sellers discusses the development of the science of industrial disease and its political and social implications in Hazards o f the,lob: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science. Despite the common occurrences of industria~diseases, such as silicosis in mines and lead poisoning in industriaii~lants across the country (pp. 14-18), they had not, by the 1880s, become a subject of serious debate or concern among government officials and medical professionals. In addition to the fact that many symptoms of industrial diseases could often be attributed to causes unrelated to the workplace (pp. 21-22), the science of occupational disease was especially slow to develop in the United States because of the American worker culture of "toughing it out" (p. 22), the widespread mistrust of doctors (pp. 24-25), and the indifference and ignorance among capitalists and factory managers (pp. 26-28). Furthermore, enjoying an already large labor market reinforced by a steady flow of immigrant workers, most corporate owners used worker turnover to solve the economic threat posed by industrial hazards (pp. 26, 28). The wide geographic dispersal of American industries, combined with the focus that nineteenth-century medical schools based on local clinical practice, precluded a systematic and standardized understanding of occupational disease (pp. 31-32). Due to the inaccessibility of private