Lois Gaul's Johns-Manville Memo on the Rhode Island Medical Journal (1983)

A four-page Johns-Manville memo of January 31, 1983, from Lois Gaul to D. H. Markusson, J-M's associate general counsel, with copies to K. Richman and B. Diemer, reporting on her review of the Rhode Island Medical Journal from 1938 to 1969. She listed items of interest, among them a 1951 state medical society report that Rhode Island's law now covered "all occupational diseases, including silicosis and asbestosis, which were previously excluded," and a 1953 article by W. C. Hueper of the National Institutes of Health whose table of "Occupational Respiratory Carcinogens" listed asbestos (printed as "Asbestosis") with the lung as the site of cancer. She also noted that an American Medical Association list in 1953 placed asbestos among occupational cancer agents in "Class D" ("Reported cases--etiology still doubtful").

What it shows

Gaul also recorded that Dr. Arthur Vorwald had spoken at the AMA's Congress on Industrial Health in 1948, and that a 1948 lecture by Philip Drinker of the Harvard School of Public Health did not mention asbestos in its section on dust diseases. She quoted Drinker's account that in 1944 a union on the West Coast had prevented the Maritime Commission, Navy and Public Health Service from giving chest X-rays to a group of shipyard welders. Her follow-up list shows the direction of the research: she had been discussing with Dr. Kotin how to see the war-years records of the AMA Council on Industrial Health, and she planned to trace references on talc used to treat collapsed lungs, though she doubted they would lead to "naval experiments with talc in submariners." She remarked that of the state medical journals she had reviewed, Rhode Island's was the best on workers' compensation, and that most others never mentioned it.