S. Roodhouse Gloyne, "Two Cases of Squamous Carcinoma of the Lung Occurring in Asbestosis" (1935)

A short medical article by S. Roodhouse Gloyne, pathologist at the City of London Hospital for Diseases of the Heart and Lungs, published in the British journal Tubercle in October 1935. Gloyne reports the autopsies of two women asbestos workers who had both asbestosis and squamous cell cancer of the lung: one, aged 35, had worked eight years as a spinner, and the other, aged 71, had two short periods of work in the mattress and opening departments of an asbestos factory. In both, the tumors were small and had not been recognized during life.

What it shows

Gloyne says plainly that he is not trying to prove that asbestos causes lung cancer; the link between the two diseases was, in his words, "still an open question." He wrote the paper to describe how the cancers grew within the scarred lung. He also notes that the second case resembled one reported the same year in the United States by Kenneth Lynch and W. A. Smith in the American Journal of Cancer. These were among the first published reports of lung cancer in people with asbestosis, on both sides of the Atlantic, in 1935.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

Johns-Manville's own chronology of what the company knew describes this document as follows:

Gloyne and Lynch case histories of asbestosis and lung cancer.