S. Roodhouse Gloyne, The Presence of the Asbestos Fibre in the Lesions of Asbestos Workers (1929)

The June 1929 issue of Tubercle, a British monthly journal on tuberculosis, kept whole in Raybestos-Manhattan's files. The asbestos article, four pages by Dr. S. Roodhouse Gloyne, pathologist at the City of London Hospital for Diseases of the Heart and Lungs (and the journal's editor), describes how he found asbestos fibers in workers' skin "corns," in the nose and mouth, in sputum, in the lung of a worker who died of pulmonary asbestosis, and in guinea pigs. Dissolving the golden "curious bodies" seen in asbestosis lungs in acid, he found asbestos fibers at their core, and proposed that "asbestos bodies" would be a better name for them.

What it shows

Gloyne's laboratory work tied the strange bodies seen in diseased lungs directly to the asbestos fiber: "whatever other material enters into their composition their basic scaffolding is the asbestos fibre." This gave doctors a way to connect a worker's lung disease to asbestos (see Asbestos Bodies). He also noted that the fibers could work through "the stockings of girl operatives" and cause corns on their legs. The next month's issue carried the fatal case on which much of this work was based: Wood and Page, A Case of Pulmonary Asbestosis. The rest of the issue is about tuberculosis.

In Johns-Manville's index

Johns-Manville's attorneys indexed the Sumner Simpson Papers. Their index describes this document as follows:

Tubercle. Relevant article "The Presence of the Asbestos Fibre in the Lesions of Asbestos Workers" by S.R. Gloyne. Article describes raw asbestos fiber. Gloyne states that the "yellow-golden" bodies found in the lungs and sputum of people exposed to asbestos dust are formed around an asbestos fiber. Asbestos fibers can be found in asbestos corns, upper respiratory tract, sputum of lungs and in animal tissue.

About this copy

This is document 00863-00916 of the Sumner Simpson Papers, as numbered in the collection's index.