Jock McCulloch (1945-2018): A Tribute

Our plain-English summary of Jock McCulloch (1945-2018): A Tribute, by G. Tweedale, B. Castleman (International Journal of Health Services, 2018).

The study

• Authors: G. Tweedale, B. Castleman
• Journal: International Journal of Health Services
• Published: 2018;48(3):586-591
• Type of article: Historical article
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

Abstract

Jock William McCulloch, who died at Melbourne, Australia, in January 2018, was one of the foremost historians of occupational health of his generation. This tribute reviews his career and oeuvre, which was tragically ended by his death from mesothelioma.

In plain English

This article is a tribute (an obituary), not a research study, and it presents no original clinical or epidemiological research. The authors, Geoffrey Tweedale and Barry Castleman, reviewed the career of Jock McCulloch, a history professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. McCulloch died on January 18, 2018, after a diagnosis of mesothelioma in April 2017. The tribute described McCulloch's books. They covered Agent Orange; the Australian asbestos industry, including an Aboriginal community at Baryugil, New South Wales, the site of an asbestos mine; South African asbestos mining, which the authors described as the main source of the world's crocidolite (blue) fiber; and silicosis in South Africa's gold mines. It also described a 2008 history of the global asbestos industry that McCulloch wrote with Tweedale. According to the authors, McCulloch toured several mines in South Africa's Northern Cape in the late 1990s. He believed his fatal asbestos exposure almost certainly happened while researching in South Africa about 20 years before his diagnosis. The tribute reports this as his own belief; the article did not investigate it.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Tribute (obituary) reviewing a historian's career and published work; not a research study
• Who was studied: One person: Jock William McCulloch, professor of history at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, who died January 18, 2018
• Exposure: Asbestos exposure that McCulloch believed occurred while researching South African asbestos mining for his book Asbestos Blues, about 20 years before his diagnosis. The tribute describes those South African mines as the main source of the world's crocidolite (blue) fiber.
• Main results:
  • McCulloch was diagnosed with mesothelioma in April 2017.
  • In the late 1990s McCulloch toured several mines in the Northern Cape of South Africa, where the landscape was littered with tailing dumps of fiber from abandoned workings.
  • The South African mines McCulloch studied for Asbestos Blues were, according to the tribute, the main source of the world's crocidolite (blue) fiber.
  • According to the tribute, Asbestos Blues (2002) described how asbestos companies first commissioned research into mesothelioma and then, in the early 1960s, suppressed the findings.
  • McCulloch's first asbestos work grew out of research on an Aboriginal community at Baryugil, New South Wales, the location of an asbestos mine.
  • McCulloch and Tweedale co-wrote Defending the Indefensible, a global study of the asbestos industry, which received the Wadsworth Prize in 2008.
  • According to the tribute, McCulloch's later book on South Africa's gold mines described how that industry, in collusion with a minority state, hid a pandemic of silicosis for most of the 20th century.
  • Recounting McCulloch's gold-mining work, the tribute states that workers with tuberculosis were allowed to spread the disease, and that by 2000 this had resulted in a disease rate among black migrant miners a hundred times higher than officially acknowledged. This figure comes from McCulloch's historical research, not from new research in this article.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors wrote that it was a bitter irony that McCulloch died trying to save others from exposure to the same asbestos fibers that, in their view, claimed his own life.

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Mesothelioma.

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• Transfer of occupational health problems from a developed to a developing country: lessons from the Japan-South Korea experience — J. Park, N. Hisanaga, et al. (2009)
• Asbestos and the law — G. Poyatos, C. Diego Roza (2017)
• Irving John Selikoff and the strange case of the missing medical degrees — P.W. Bartrip (2003)
• Sources in the history of occupational health: the Turner & Newall archive — G. Tweedale (2000)
• South Africa's export trade in asbestos: demise of an industry — J.S. Harington, N.D. McGlashan, et al. (2010)

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