Lois Gaul's Manville Memo on the Bulletin of Hygiene (1985)

An eight-page Manville memo of February 18, 1985, from Lois Gaul to eight colleagues, among them D. H. Markusson and Dr. P. Kotin, on the Bulletin of Hygiene, a monthly British journal of abstracts from the medical literature published from 1926. Gaul described the journal, noted that its sections on cancer show "the gradual linking of lung cancer to occupational and environmental factors," and listed 37 abstracts "of particular interest," from 1927 to 1964, each with a short summary or quotation. She offered to show anyone the full abstract of any of them.

What it shows

The abstracts include the British Chief Inspector of Factories' report for 1938 ("Cancer of the lung was associated with 12 out of 103 fatal cases of asbestosis"), Wilhelm Hueper's 1946 paper on excess cancers among workers in asbestos manufacturing plants, Philip Drinker's 1947 paper on asbestos in pipe covering in wartime shipyards, and a 1951 case of lung cancer with asbestosis in a man who had covered pipes with asbestos. Of a 1954 paper on diatomaceous earth disease, Gaul wrote that "Although Johns-Manville is not named, author is obviously describing the Lompoc plant," where, by the abstract's account, 32 compensation claims had been filed in 20 years and only 8 paid. The last item is Selikoff's 1964 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which she marks as the "First Selikoff paper cited."