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By David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. xiv + 229 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-04758-8.)
A sophisticated understanding of how class and conflict shape social, economic, political, and intellectual change underlies this first attempt at a history of occupational health spanning the twentieth century. The book succeeds through reliance on a case study of silicosis, a lung disease caused by the inhalation of silica dust, which threatened workers in many settings but especially in mines, quarries, and foundries. A disease "emblematic of its century," silicosis and struggles over its definition, diagnosis, prevalence, compensation, and prevention shaped a federal role in the identification and control of industrial diseases and chronic diseases, challenged American faith in industrial and scientific "progress," and undermined the ideology of scientific objectivity and neutrality. The telling of this story implicates the history of labor, medicine,...