Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science, and: Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Health Reform: 1910-1935 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science, and: Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935 * Katherine G. Aiken (bio) Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science. By Christopher C. Sellers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xv+331; illustrations, figures, notes, index. $45. Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910–1935. By Claudia Clark. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xii+280; notes, bibliography. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Although occupational diseases kill thousands of Americans each year—one hundred thousand deaths and four hundred thousand new illnesses annually (Clark, p. 11)—they have received little notice from either the public or historians. These two well-written and provocative works illuminate the significance of occupational disease in American workplaces, while exploring how reformers during the Progressive period sought to draw attention to them. In that historical process, a new discipline, industrial [End Page 794] hygiene, developed. Its practitioners navigated a hazardous course as they attempted to satisfy workers, employers, and the government, while at the same time establishing pathbreaking public policy. Christopher Sellers provides an overview of industrial health issues and examines how experts struggled to find connections between workplace causes and disease, an often frustrating process that required a new combination of scientific, medical, and social inquiry. Looking at the years 1900 to 1940, Sellers skillfully weaves class and gender considerations into his study while focusing on several individuals and their motivations. That enduring symbol of modernity and industrialization, the “White City” of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, owed its legendary appearance to several coats of white lead paint. Although lead toxicity was then well known, several painters suffered lead poisoning, and, as Sellers points out, the fair buildings thus came to symbolize both the genius of American industry and its costs in terms of worker health. Hull House resident and industrial hygiene pioneer Dr. Alice Hamilton sought to alert the nation to the dangers of lead and to convince managers to reexamine lead poisoning. In the process she helped to change “the very character of discussion about occupational disease in the United States” (Sellers, p. 101). Hamilton embraced the decidedly Progressive notion that once information regarding lead toxicity was made available, it would lead to the education of both the public and managers, accompanied by legislation and changes in management practice. Despite Hamilton’s optimistic and perhaps naive conviction, it soon became clear that the interests of workers and management were often diametrically opposed. Although Hamilton and other industrial hygienists succeeded in gaining some modifications in workplace practice, they fought an uphill battle in their efforts to make worker safety a priority. Sellers argues convincingly that industrial hygiene has contemporary resonance as a precursor of environmental health—a direct line connects Hamilton and Rachel Carson. Whereas Samuel Hays has emphasized a change in American values as the key ingredient in environmentalism, Sellers maintains that the science and methodology that Hamilton and others pioneered were also prerequisites. Claudia Clark helps to answer the question of where the victims of industrial poisoning are in all of this. Clark sets about giving at least one group of victims a voice by recounting an episode that is a classic case of industrial disease and one of the earliest examples of the ill effects of radioactivity. She succeeds admirably in supplying faces to accompany this heartbreaking story of workplace illness and its impact. Before World War I, men carried pocket watches. The demands of trench warfare and the need to tell the time even in the dark led to the widespread use of wristwatches with luminous dials. By 1920, these watches had become a fad for women as well. Dial painters carefully applied self-luminous [End Page 795] paint that contained an “infinitesimal quantity of radium” (Clark, p. 14) to the watch faces, usually pointing their brushes with their lips before dipping them into the paint. Although the toxicity of lead was well documented, radium was a new substance and was even sold for medicinal purposes during that period. However, by 1923, many dial painters began to experience gruesome and sometimes deadly...