Dr. H. Montague Murray's Evidence to the Departmental Committee on Compensation for Industrial Diseases (1907)

Questions 4076 to 4104 of the minutes of evidence taken by Britain's Departmental Committee on Compensation for Industrial Diseases and published by His Majesty's Stationery Office in 1907, as a three-page typed copy followed by a photocopy of the printed page. Dr. H. Montague Murray, senior physician at Charing Cross Hospital in London, described a man he had treated in 1899 and 1900 who had worked about 14 years in an asbestos factory, the first ten in the carding room. The man said he was the only survivor of the ten people working in that room when he started; he died in April 1900, and a post-mortem examination confirmed what Murray had found: "marked pulmonary fibrosis." Asked whether the disease might still occur, Murray answered: "If there is dust, certainly."

What it shows

Murray told the committee that when the case occurred he had looked for statistics and found none, and that he had not seen another case since. The committee spoke of dust phthisis; the name asbestosis came twenty years later, in a paper that calls Murray's case "the first and, down to 1924, the only record of a death due to asbestos" (Cooke, 1927). A U.S. government report of 1918 also cited his evidence (Hoffman, 1918).

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

Asbestos death reported in British medical literature, ten years textile industry exposure. (Murray).

Editor's note: J-M's description calls this a report in British medical literature of a death after ten years in the textile industry. It is Dr. Murray's evidence to a government committee, printed in its 1907 minutes, and the man he described had worked about 14 years in an asbestos factory, the first ten in the carding room.

Related documents

• W. E. Cooke, "Pulmonary Asbestosis," with Papers by Stuart McDonald and Sir Thomas Oliver (1927)