Industrial Hygiene Digest: The Industry Foundation's Abstracts, 1939–1968

The Industrial Hygiene Digest was the monthly abstract journal of the Air Hygiene Foundation of America, renamed the Industrial Hygiene Foundation of America in 1941. The foundation was set up at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh in 1935, in the wake of the Gauley Bridge silicosis disaster, by companies that wanted their own research body for dust disease and the lawsuits it brought. Steel, glass, mining, chemical and insurance companies paid dues to belong, and so did Johns-Manville. In return they received the Digest: every month, numbered abstracts of the world's medical, engineering and legal literature on occupational disease. It began in 1937.

These are Johns-Manville's own copies, from its file S-706 and its litigation production: eleven issues from 1939 to 1957 and the cover and editorial of the May 1968 issue, free to read online or download. In 1939–1942 each issue opens with Foundation Facts, the foundation's newsletter to its members.

How to use the archive

Each year has its own page with that year's issues and an index of their contents by topic. Every abstract is listed by its number, with the paper's author and journal. Choose an entry and the issue opens at its page. Asbestos items are grouped under the heading "Asbestos."

• 1939, Volume 3: August, November
• 1940, Volume 4: April, May
• 1941, Volume 5: August, December
• 1942, Volume 6: January, March, September
• 1955, Volume 19: September
• 1957, Volume 21: June
• 1968, Volume 32: May (cover and editorial only)

Why it matters

A company that belonged to the foundation was told, month by month, what the science said. The Digest's readers were the safety directors, plant physicians and executives of its member companies, and the foundation asked them to pass it around.

What reached Johns-Manville about asbestos through these issues:

• April 1940, abstract 282: an X-ray study of the workmen at an asbestos brake-lining plant over ten years. Twelve had been retired with asbestosis, and 90 men sued when the plant closed. The authors themselves held "the fiber is innocent," a view the later science overturned.
• September 1942, abstract 832: the American Public Health Association's committee on pneumoconiosis, chaired by R. R. Sayers of the U.S. Bureau of Mines, reported "no longer any question about the specific harmfulness of free silica and of asbestos." Abstract 834 in the same issue reports Leroy U. Gardner's experiments with chrysotile asbestos at Saranac.
• September 1955, abstract 1113: Richard Doll's study of the workers at a British asbestos textile works. The abstract reports that lung cancer was found in 18 of 105 necropsies and concludes "that lung cancer is a specific hazard of asbestos workers," with a risk among men employed for 20 years or more "of the order of ten times" that of the general population. The same issue carries the program of the foundation's November 1955 general meeting, where Johns-Manville's president, A. R. Fisher, introduced as "an outstanding authority on the mining and technology of asbestos," was to open the program with "The Economics of Industrial Health."
• June 1957, abstract 761: the Danish report on asbestosis with pleural calcification among insulation workers. Of 31 men with more than 20 years in the trade, 22 had abnormal X-rays. (This issue is also in the Motley 1000.)
• May 1968, the editorial "Progress in IHF Asbestos Bioeffects Research": the foundation tells its members why the asbestos studies disagree, prints Dr. J. Knox's letter disputing Selikoff, Hammond and Churg on asbestos, smoking and cancer, and puts forward its own hypothesis that "some impurity or associated substance," not the asbestos alone, may be the major factor.

About these copies

Johns-Manville kept the Digest in file S-706, "Industrial Hygiene Foundation (IHF)- Industrial Hygiene Digest," which we bought from the J-M archive. The 1939–1942 pages carry J-M's document numbers, and the 1955 and 1957 issues its production stamp, "PRODUCED JM-83." The file also holds the cover and editorial of the May 1968 issue, published here, and a full August 1980 issue, a plaintiff's trial exhibit. That is a later work whose rights we have not cleared, so it is not published here yet.

The Digest was never registered for copyright and no issue was renewed, so the 1939–1957 issues are in the public domain in the United States. The May 1968 issue was published without a copyright notice, so it is in the public domain too.

If you have issues we are missing, we would like to hear from you.