In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health
disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how for decades after methods of
prevention were known hundreds of thousands of American miners
suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by
the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of
government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this
disease -- and even to acknowledge its existence -- resulted in a
national tragedy, the effects of which are still being felt.
The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when the
disorders brought on by exposure to coal mine dust were first
identified as components of a debilitating and distinctive illness.
For several decades thereafter, coal miners' dust disease was
accepted, in both lay and professional circles, as a major
industrial disease. Derickson describes how after the turn of the
century medical professionals and industry representatives worked
to discredit and supplant knowledge about black lung, with such
success that the ceased to be recognized. Many authorities
maintained that breathing coal mine dust was actually beneficial to
health.
Derickson shows that activists ultimately forced society to
overcome its complacency about this deadly and preventable disease.
He chronicles the growth of an unprecedented movement -- from the
turn-of-the-century miners' union, to the social medicine activists
in the mid-twentieth century, and the black lung insurgents of the
late sixties -- which eventually won landmark protections and
compensation with the enactment: of the Federal Coal Mine Health
and Safety Act in 1969.
An extraordinary work of scholarship, Black Lung exposes the
enormous human cost ofproducing the energy source responsible for
making the United States the world's preeminent industrial
nation.
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