Lois Gaul's Manville Memo on the Public Health Service Outline of Lectures on Industrial Diseases (1985)

A one-page Manville internal memo of March 28, 1985, from Lois Gaul to nine colleagues including Dr. P. Kotin, on the revised Outline of Lectures on Industrial Diseases for Medical Students, prepared by Harry Heimann in August 1951 as Public Health Service Publication No. 115. She notes that asbestos is mentioned only briefly, but that on page 34 "Lung cancer occurrence" is listed as a topic under asbestos, and on page 57 asbestos is a topic under occupational cancer of the lungs, subdivided into "in asbestosis" and "animal experiments."

What it shows

The outline gave sources of asbestos exposure as "mining and milling of asbestos, asbestos cloth production, asbestos brick manufacture." Gaul reports that its bibliography had almost 800 references, and that most of the asbestos papers in it "were case reports of asbestosis associated with lung cancer." A 1951 federal teaching outline for medical students thus listed lung cancer as a subject to teach under asbestos. The memo is one of a series written at Manville in the mid-1980s, while the company was defending asbestos lawsuits, recording what older publications said.