The earliest recorded historical recognition of the hazards of asbestos dates back to the time of Christ. In modern times, as early as 1897 a Vienna physician wrote that emaciation and pulmonary problems in asbestos weavers and their families left no doubt that asbestos inhalation was the cause. Also, prior to the 1900s, in Great Britain, women factory inspectors gave special attention to asbestos manufacturing processes on account of known cases of injury to the lungs of 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 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 “proved” case of pulmonary disease from asbestos in modern times.
The first detailed case report of asbestosis appearing in the general 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 and intermittently after age 26, until she was totally disabled at the age of 31. Ms. Kershaw’s disability from asbestos poisoning eventually led to her death. Dr. Cooke named the disease that killed her “pulmonary asbestosis.”
In 1930, Drs. E.R.A. Merewether and C. W. Price produced an historic report detailing their investigation of working conditions in Great Britain’s asbestos industry. Their recommendations included the control of dust exposures in asbestos plants and periodic medical examinations of plant workers. Additionally, they stressed the importance of worker education about the hazards of working with and around asbestos.
The attention the British were paying asbestos hazards in 1930 garnered considerable attention in the United States, as well. Around this same time, the first case reports of asbestosis in the United States were being widely published. Dr. Merewether’s findings were reported 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 on asbestosis appeared in the medical journal.
But these revelations about asbestos-related lung disease 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 just the first of several major conferences held by the ILO that brought experts on dust-related lung disease from all over the world.
Thus, by 1930, widespread knowledge of the dangers of asbestos was widely available to all companies and industries. And from this point forward, the information these companies received about asbestos hazards from published medical and scientific literature was to grow exponentially.
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