Lois Gaul's Literature Review Memos for Manville's Asbestos Litigation (1982–1993)

A 334-page collection of Johns-Manville and Manville internal memos written by Lois Gaul, a researcher in the company's legal department, mostly "to the File" and some to D. H. Markusson, R. D. Batson and others in the department, from November 1982 to August 1993. Each memo reports on a journal, abstract service or old book she reviewed, mostly at the "C.U. Medical Library" (probably the University of Colorado's), and lists the items in it that bear on asbestos, dust disease and cancer: the Bulletin of Hygiene, British Abstracts, the British Journal of Industrial Medicine, Excerpta Medica, Metropolitan Life's Statistical Bulletin, the Public Health Bulletin, Alice Hamilton's Industrial Toxicology and dozens more. Many end with a judgment such as "Nothing on asbestos" or "not applicable to asbestos or the government litigation."

What it shows

The memos show how Manville's lawyers built their "state of the art" record: what the medical and industrial hygiene literature said about asbestos, and when, for use in the government litigation (J-M's suits against the United States over shipyard claims), the insurance litigation, and later the Manville Trust and property damage cases. Gaul's notes are often pointed. Of British Abstracts she wrote in 1985 that it "demonstrates, again, that the British took a greater interest in occupational health problems than did the American medical/scientific community," and in 1983 she asked whether anyone had "pursued what any of the insurance companies may have published on occupational health during the war years." The last memo, of August 23, 1993, describes a draft "property damages medical/scientific chronology." A shorter list she prepared for Dr. Paul Kotin is Lois Gaul to Dr. Paul Kotin Enclosing a Bibliography on Asbestos in Shipyards (1985).