Dr. Kenneth Lynch to Julian Mitchell on Gardner's Fine-Dust Findings (1938)

A one-page copy of a letter of May 6, 1938, from Dr. Kenneth Lynch, a Charleston, South Carolina, pathologist, to Julian Mitchell, Raybestos-Manhattan's attorney in Charleston, commenting on Dr. Leroy Gardner's report on fine asbestos dust compared with longer fiber dust. Lynch wrote that "the only thing that can yet be positively stated is that in the human sufficient exposure to asbestos dust will cause asbestosis," while what counts as sufficient exposure was still unknown. He did not follow Vandiver Brown's suggestion, in a letter of April 28, 1938, that Gardner's experiments would answer the claim that the scarring is progressive.

What it shows

Gardner's findings suggested the coarser dust might be more harmful than the fine, and Lynch thought the factory should begin to think more about precautions in departments where the dust was coarser. He also doubted that Gardner's work said anything about whether asbestosis exists at all, as E. H. Jeffords had suggested to him, and he wrote that no one could know the hazard at the local plant until its workers were examined in the way the South African report described.

In Johns-Manville's index

Johns-Manville's legal department indexed the Motley 1,000 in 1984. Its index describes this document as follows:

Dr. Kenneth Lynch (Charleston, S.C.) letter to Julian Mitchell, 5/6/38, commenting on Dr. Gardner's report of his recent investigations on the effects of exposure to fine asbestos dust as compared to longer fiber dust. Dr. Lynch states that "the only thing that can yet be positively stated is that in the human sufficient exposure to asbestos dust will cause asbestosis," but it is still not known what causes sufficient exposure. Dr. Lynch does not agree with V. Brown that Dr. Gardner's experiments negate claims that fibrosis is of a progressive character.

About this copy

This is document 218 of the Motley 1,000, from the set the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust's records facility certified as true copies, pages CRMC-Motley1000-Subj-001307 to CRMC-Motley1000-Subj-001307.