Lois Gaul's Manville Memo on Robert Coope's Diseases of the Chest (1984)

A one-page Manville memo to file of September 27, 1984, by Lois Gaul, on Diseases of the Chest Described for Students and Practitioners by Dr. Robert Coope, published in Baltimore in 1944. She quoted the book as saying that for lung cancer "there are no convincingly proved causal factors," apart perhaps from radioactive dust in certain European miners, and noted that mesothelioma of the pleura is not mentioned. The chapter on dust diseases has a section on asbestosis, which she had copied for the company's Health, Safety and Environment (HS&E) library.

What it shows

Gaul recorded that the book makes no mention "of any hazard to end users of asbestos-containing materials," and quoted its statement that the asbestos industry "has a comparatively short history, and it is only in the last twenty years that the disease arising from it has been extensively studied." Her notes on what this 1944 textbook did and did not say about cancer and about people who used asbestos products show the questions Manville was asking of the older medical literature in the mid-1980s.