Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science Alan Derickson Christopher C. Sellers. Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xv + 331 pp. Ill. $45.00. In Hazards of the Job, Christopher Sellers traces the rise and transformation of industrial hygiene—the paradigm within which biomedical investigators in the United States explored the impact of working conditions on the health of workers from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. As if it were not a formidable enough task to elucidate the changing context, aims, problems, methods, allies, and opponents of occupational medicine, Sellers also sets out to illuminate the emergence of environmental health science. His argument is that “it was within and through industrial hygiene that the study of environmental health acquired its modern cast” (p. 2). Sellers succeeds admirably in analyzing the accomplishments and contradictions of the first two generations of North American experts in occupational medicine. The hygienists’ search for disciplinary power perennially encountered the blunt obstructions and suffocating constraints of corporate capital. Moreover, investigators fortunate enough to gain access to the hidden environment of production often found themselves dealing with fearful and denying workers. In these forbidding circumstances, industrial hygienists ingeniously maneuvered to craft an approach both sufficiently rigorous to win scientific authority and sufficiently flexible in its ameliorative suggestions to accommodate business interests. The resulting strategies, as Sellers makes abundantly clear, brought some major advances in hazard recognition and control, but left most U.S. workers unprotected against the lethal risks of a proliferation of toxic chemicals, as well as physical and biological agents. The author vividly and penetratingly captures the predicament of the leaders of this fledging subspecialty, who were struggling to stake out a domain without much backing from either labor or the state and with too much guidance from capital. In this effort, he manages both to [End Page 364] elevate previously underappreciated figures like David Edsall and Joseph Schereschewsky and to reveal new facets of well-known characters like Alice Hamilton and Wilhelm Hueper. The emphasis on key individuals comes at a price, however. Except for the role of national meetings and some aspects of the expansion of state administrative capacity, institutional developments receive short shrift in this account. Although, to be sure, Sellers does take up the involvement of the American Association for Labor Legislation with phosphorus poisoning, the activities of a number of other important advocacy groups—the National Consumers League and the National Child Labor Committee, among others—receive scant attention. The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (curiously, a private, not public, body) appears only in a footnote. Especially in order to understand fully the handling of occupational disease by the associative state and other largely self-regulatory regimes of the period, we need to know more about civil institutions in this field. Notwithstanding these limitations, Hazards of the Job is a welcome addition to the historical literature of occupational and environmental health. It is an imaginatively conceived and subtly argued study of an important facet of twentieth-century public health. Alan Derickson Pennsylvania State University, University Park Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press