Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science
Christopher C. Sellers | 1900-01-01 00:00:00 | University of North Carolina Press | 331 | Economics
Hazards of the Job explores the roots of modern environmentalism in the early-twentieth-century United States. It was in the workplace of this era, argues Christopher Sellers, that our contemporary understanding of environmental health dangers first took shape. At the crossroads where medicine and science met business, labor, and the state, industrial hygiene became a crucible for molding midcentury notions of corporate interest and professional disinterest as well as environmental concepts of the 'normal' and the 'natural.' The evolution of industrial hygiene illuminates how powerfully battles over knowledge and objectivity could reverberate in American society: new ways of establishing cause and effect begat new predicaments in medicine, law, economics, politics, and ethics, even as they enhanced the potential for environmental control. From the 1910s through the 1930s, as Sellers shows, industrial hygiene investigators fashioned a professional culture that gained the confidence of corporations, unions, and a broader public. As the hygienists moved beyond the workplace, this microenvironment prefigured their understanding of the environment at large. Transforming themselves into linchpins of science-based production and modern consumerism, they also laid the groundwork for many controversies to come.
Reviews
GRADE:A++++++++++ Informative, Fun, Captivating. BUY THIS BOOK! YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY! Sellers is a genius. His knowledge of health and industry is pure expertise. He is a top notch researcher who has an extremely captivating writing style. He is truly an expert on many subjects such as health and industry. I thought this subject would be a bore but I WAS WRONG! Sellers uses real world examples that explore the societal issues facing America today in a fun and captivating manner. It is a work of art. Each page was a new journey into Health, Industry, society, and man kinds influence. EXCELLENT BOOK!
Reviews
Hazards of the Job traces the development of the field of occupational health from a "highly diverse, localized, and contradictory" body of knowledge to a more modern science based on quantitative, experimental techniques. In late-19th-century America, occupational diseases such as lead poisoning and silicosis were on the rise but went unrecognized. Physicians were stymied by nonspecific clinical presentations, the lack of scientific data, an orientation toward individual patients rather than groups, and their own loyalties to factory owners. Workers tended to ignore symptoms, avoid doctors, and resist attributing their illnesses to their occupations, which could lead to job loss. Legal traditions favored employers and usually precluded linking workplace exposures to illnesses.
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