Lois Gaul's Manville Memo on Thomas Oliver's Diseases of Occupation (1985)

A one-page Manville internal memo to file of March 12, 1985, from Lois Gaul, on the third edition of Thomas Oliver's Diseases of Occupation from the Legislative, Social and Medical Points of View (1916), which she reviewed at the Library of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. She notes four chapters on dusts and mining, and that although several forms of pneumoconiosis are discussed (anthracosis, chalicosis, silicosis, siderosis and byssinosis), "there is no mention of asbestosis or of hazards related to asbestos dust."

What it shows

This is one of a series of short memos written at Manville in the mid-1980s, while the company was defending asbestos lawsuits, recording what early books and journals on industrial disease said, or did not say, about asbestos. Gaul reviewed only the 1916 edition.