W. E. Cooke, "Pulmonary Asbestosis," with Papers by Stuart McDonald and Sir Thomas Oliver (1927)

Three papers on lung disease from asbestos, read at the British Medical Association's 1927 annual meeting in Edinburgh and printed in the British Medical Journal of December 3, 1927, with two plates of microscope photographs. In "Pulmonary Asbestosis," Dr. W. E. Cooke of the Wigan Infirmary gives a fuller account of the woman whose death he had reported in 1924, with notes on the history and manufacture of asbestos. Dr. Stuart McDonald of the University of Durham describes the "curious bodies" he found in her lung tissue, and Sir Thomas Oliver adds clinical observations of two living women asbestos workers he had examined near Leeds.

What it shows

Cooke's title gave the disease the name it still carries. He called his own case and Dr. Murray's (Murray, 1907) "the first and, down to 1924, the only record of a death due to asbestos," and wrote that medical men "have long suspected asbestos dust to be the cause of lung conditions in workers in badly ventilated factories." Oliver added that several deaths of British asbestos workers had probably been certified as tuberculosis because no autopsies were done. Two years later Metropolitan Life's dust survey of J-M's Manville plant cited Cooke's paper (Metropolitan Life, 1929).

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Cooke coins term "asbestosis" on 12/3/27.