Lois Gaul's Manville Memo on Asbestos Items in Abstracts of World Medicine (1985)

A two-page Manville internal memo of February 6, 1985, from Lois Gaul to eight colleagues including Dr. P. Kotin, reporting on her review of all 45 volumes (1947 to 1971) of Abstracts of World Medicine, a monthly of the British Medical Association, for items bearing on asbestos health litigation. She lists five abstracts "of special interest," from 1947 to 1962, quoting what each abstracter wrote about asbestos, lung cancer and insulation work.

What it shows

Among the items: A. Meiklejohn's abstract of a 1956 Danish paper on pleural calcification in insulation workers, stating that "experience in many countries has established that workmen employed in the lagging of pipes and boilers may contract pneumoconiosis in the course of their employment"; Richard Doll's comment on a 1958 study of chrysotile miners that "the type most commonly associated with asbestosis is hornblende"; and L. W. Hale's 1962 remark that "asbestos is being used in many apparently innocent materials," such as wallboard and plaster. Gaul notes that a 1960 reviewer still wrote of "the alleged association between asbestosis and cancer of the lung." The memo shows Manville in 1985 gathering what the medical literature had said, and when, about disease among insulators and product users.