Deposition of Dr. Alfred A. Angrist in the South Carolina Insulator Cases (1978)

Eleven pages from the January 1978 deposition of Dr. Alfred A. Angrist, a New York pathologist, taken in Charleston in In re All Asbestos Cases (Insulator Cases) in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina, with Ronald L. Motley for the plaintiffs and lawyers for Johns-Manville and other defendants. Questioned about the lung cancer cases he reported with Holleb in 1942 and with Stoll and Bass in 1951, Angrist describes finding asbestos bodies "right in the tumor" and an unusual pattern of fibrosis. Asked whether his 1942 paper said that asbestosis and cancer were associated, he answered that he "was convinced even after that first case, these two cases, that there was an association between asbestosis and cancer," though as "a conservative pathologist" he had not said so outright.

What it shows

The deposition gives the author's own account of two of the early American case reports (Holleb and Angrist, 1942; Stoll, Bass and Angrist, 1951) and shows the defense questioning how much those papers had claimed at the time.

In Johns-Manville's chronology

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

Angrist has testified that he found asbestosis among insulators by 1951.

Editor's note: J-M's description says Angrist testified that he found asbestosis among insulators by 1951. Nothing in these excerpts says that; his testimony here concerns the two hospital case reports he published in 1942 and 1951.