Benjamin Szymanski v. Johns-Manville Corporation, Medical Records, X-Ray Readings and Saranac Letters (1946)

A 32-page file Johns-Manville assembled on the 1946 lawsuit of Benjamin Szymanski, a worker at its Manville, New Jersey, factory who claimed he had asbestosis. It holds J-M's case summary and service record (hired 1923, some 14 years on saws and planers in the magnesia department, "out ill since 4-5-44"), X-ray reports from the Somerset County Tuberculosis and Health Association and Somerset Hospital, a medical summary by J-M's Dr. A. N. Pauly, film readings from the Trudeau Sanatorium, and a letter of May 22, 1946, from Dr. Leroy Gardner of the Saranac Laboratory, copied to Vandiver Brown. Gardner wrote: "I cannot believe it is asbestosis, nor do I think we have any reason to call it silicosis." The file ends with the complaint and a stipulation discontinuing the federal case without costs.

What it shows

The outside readings did not agree with J-M's. The county association's first report, of January 1944, described "Diffuse fibrosis in both lung fields presenting a ground glass appearance" and said the lesions "do not suggest tuberculosis," and a hospital doctor later diagnosed asbestosis. J-M's plant physician, Dr. L. C. Fritts, called the disease "a fibrous type of tuberculosis." Pauly then sent the films to Dr. Pascucci at Trudeau, to Metropolitan Life, where Dr. W. J. McConnell found "no indication of a dust fibrosis," and to Gardner, asking that everything be returned "unless Mr. Vandiver Brown has directed otherwise." Pauly's own summary records that in 1941, after a bout of chronic bronchitis, "it was advised that he be removed from dust exposure which was not done." Gardner found a mix of dust reaction and infection he did not "know how to catalog," and said a thorough clinical study would be essential. Several reports appear more than once in the file. The complaint and the plant letters are also on a chronology page, J-M's answer and Szymanski's sworn answers on another, and a companion suit by Joseph Slovak, whose films Gardner also read, on a third.