Black Lung

Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster

Alan Derickson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801471544
• Topic: Médecine
• Subtopic: Santé publique, administration et soins

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 this disease 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 of producing the energy source responsible for making the United States the world's preeminent industrial nation.

CHAPTER ONE

THEY SPIT A BLACK SUBSTANCE

On September 14, 1881, H. A. Lemen, professor of medicine at the University of Denver and president of the Colorado State Medical Society, presented a paper at the society’s annual meeting. Lemen offered for his colleagues’ edification the case of his patient James McKeever, for thirty years a coal miner in Scotland, England, and Pennsylvania. He noted McKeever’s “harassing cough,” “care-worn expression,” and other nonspecific symptoms. In contrast to such vague indications of chronic respiratory disease, he also announced the less ambiguous finding that this patient sometimes expectorated more than a pint of black liquid in a day. After commenting on the “decidedly inky appearance” of the substance, the Denver physician made this disclosure: “The sentence I am reading was written with this fluid. The pen used has never been in ink.” The impact of this stratagem on its immediate audience remains unknown. But it is evident from the inclusion of Lemen’s case report in the state medical society’s program that by the 1880s physicians in Colorado had developed some curiosity about the health consequences of mining coal.¹

As pneumoconiosis made its first appearance in coal-mining districts across the United States, medical practitioners like Lemen struggled to understand its causes and effects. They achieved a degree of success. Clinical and pathological studies managed to illuminate a discrete clinical entity well before the turn of the twentieth century. The state helped clarify the nature, if not the full extent, of this disorder. By 1900, investigators had brought forth compelling evidence of the existence of a debilitating occupational disease, known most commonly in biomedical discourse as anthracosis and in lay parlance as miners’ asthma.

Early initiatives to recognize dust-induced respiratory disease in the coalfields had to surmount considerable obstacles. The enormous toll exacted by traumatic injuries served to obscure anthracosis. In the 1890s, occupational injuries killed more than 1,000 coal diggers per year. In particular, frequent spectacular disasters diverted attention from the less spectacular phenomenon of chronic disease. When, for instance, the Avondale mine near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, caught fire on September 6, 1869, taking 108 lives, the nation was momentarily transfixed.² The historiography of nineteenth-century working conditions in coal has tended to reinforce the view that injury, not illness, constituted the only important type of risk to miners. This chapter shows that miners’ repiratory illness became a significant problem even in the nineteenth century and, further, that it was identified as such at the time. Indeed, this account will demonstrate that anthracosis stood out as one of the leading occupational diseases of the industrializing era.³

The lack of historical research on the emergence of coal workers’ disease is, unfortunately, hardly unique. There have been very few in-depth studies of occupational diseases, except lead poisoning, for the period before 1900. Carey McCord’s review of the nineteenth-century medical literature demonstrated that considerable interest surrounded work-induced illness. Reacting to the assertion that U.S. investigators published only about twenty reports on occupational disease before 1900, McCord compiled a bibliography of more than two hundred entries on diverse acute and chronic conditions.⁴ But four decades later, almost none of his provocative leads for historical research have been explored. The health hazards of twentieth-century workplaces are the subject of a growing body of scholarship.⁵ Nonetheless, the preceding century of industrial transformation remains virtually the prehistoric age with regard to the impact of work on health.

Occupational disease among U.S. coal workers arose in a burgeoning industry essential to the developing economy. Commercial coal extraction began inauspiciously in Virginia in the eighteenth century. But by the second half of the nineteenth century, large-scale production for regional, national, and export markets took place in fields scattered across more than twenty states, with major centers in the Midwest and central Appalachia. Demand for fuel for rail transportation, home heating, and industrial manufacturing soared in the decades after the Civil War. In 1870, U.S. firms dug forty million tons of anthracite and bituminous coal. By 1900, production had multiplied more than sixfold. The industry’s work force grew from just under 100,000 in 1870 to almost 500,000 in 1900. These producers made the United States by far the foremost coal-producing nation at the turn of the century, with roughly one-third of world output.⁶

Coal-mining technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained essentially preindustrial. To be sure, methods of extraction changed over the period and varied widely among mines at any given time. Nonetheless, before 1900 most mines depended primarily on animate sources of power and hand tools to extract coal. As Keith Dix and others have demonstrated, the most distinctive characteristic of the labor process in this era was the time-consuming, worker-paced loading of coal cars by hand shoveling.⁷

Coal diggers in the Gilded Age all too often toiled in an environment that presented a serious respiratory hazard. Many routine tasks raised dust. Preparing for the explosion of charges involved undercutting the coal face with a hand pick. Lying on his side at arm’s length from the point of dust generation, the miner could not avoid breathing mineral particles. In the late 1870s, the journalist Henry Sheafer reported that “every stroke of the pick dislodges a fresh shower of dust, to be inhaled by the miner.” The strenuous exercise of undercutting raised the miner’s rate of respiration, increasing the dose of dust. The shift to undercutting machines at the end of the century dramatically exacerbated this hazard. Using an auger drill to bore the holes into which blasting powder was placed further exposed coal workers to dust. Blasting itself produced immense quantities of mineral particles. The common practice of returning to the working face soon after the detonation of charges meant entering an area filled with particulate matter. The laborious chore of loading broken coal into cars stirred large amounts of dust into the air. Transporting, unloading, and cleaning the extracted material gave a dose of dust to laborers far from the mine face. “The wonder is not that men die of clogged-up lungs,” Sheafer concluded, “but that they manage to exist so long in an atmosphere which seems to contain at least fifty per cent of solid matter.”⁸

Almost everywhere in the years before 1900, and for long thereafter in small operations, ventilation systems did too little to abate air contamination. Primitive workings, particularly drift mines that reached a coal seam by tunneling into a hillside, often relied on natural ventilation. Many mines went only one step beyond natural airflow by setting up furnaces at the bottom of the mine shaft to create an updraft to move air. John Brophy worked under such an arrangement in the bituminous fields of central Pennsylania in the 1890s. “An elaborate system of fans and blowers was ‘too costly,’” Brophy sardonically explained, “so the miner had to pay for bad ventilation by ‘miners’ asthma’ and other ailments caused by bad air, stagnant at best.” Even where fans operated, they sometimes did not deliver fresh air to the far reaches of the underground labyrinths where many employees were stationed. When air flow did not remove mineral particles, layers of dust accumulated on the floor of the mine and on other surfaces. Inevitably, the movements of workers and mules recirculated this dust.⁹

By the second half of the nineteenth century, an extensive medical literature linked coal mine dust with workers’ ill health. European science shaped North American understanding of miners’ respiratory distress in important ways. Of particular significance, the French school of pathological anatomy, though past its heyday, exerted both direct influence on American developments and indirect influence via Britain. The work of several British anatomical investigators paved the way for what became the dominant paradigm. Andrew Meiklejohn astutely concluded that British physicians of the mid-nineteenth century “were dependent almost entirely on the correlation of clinical observations with morbid anatomical changes observed at post-mortem inspections.” Tying unmistakable, readily perceived signs and symptoms to anatomical discoveries offered strong substantiation of the existence of miners’ pneumoconiosis. More important for the diffusion of knowledge across society, pathological anatomy demystified coal workers’ disease by extracting and revealing the physical damage done by dust accumulation and by connecting this damage to lay observations of illness. Accessible to both the general public and clinical practitioners, who generally lacked a strong foundation in the biological sciences, this form of scientific inquiry yielded especially convincing evidence of the miners’ condition.¹⁰

The long-established coal industry of Britain gave rise to a stream of case studies. James Gregory at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh took a major step toward clarification of the respiratory ailments of coal workers in 1831 with the publication of a “Case of Peculiar Black Infiltration of the Whole Lungs, Resembling Melanosis.” Gregory began by sounding an alarm for “those practitioners who reside in the vicinity of the great coal mines, and who may have charge of the health of the miners, to the existence of a disease, to which that numerous class of the community would appear to be peculiarly exposed.” He then presented the case of John Hogg, a fifty-nine-year-old miner, who had died under his care earlier that year. He enumerated Hogg’s main symptoms—dyspnea, chest pain, palpitations, expectoration, and cough—and his sinking trajectory. Gregory reported in detail on his postmortem examination:

When cut into, both lungs presented one uniform black carbonaceous colour, pervading every part of their substance. The right lung was much disorganized, and exhibited in its upper and middle lobes several large irregular cavities, communicating with one another and traversed by numerous bands of pulmonary substance and vessels. The cavities contained a good deal of fluid, which, as well as the walls of the cavities, partook of the same black colour.

The Scottish physician explained this condition by the patient’s inhalation of coal dust on the job. He backed this inference by recounting that Hogg “himself attributed the complaint of which he died to the air of the coal mines in which he had been working for so many years.”¹¹ Gregory, like most other nineteenth-century investigators, took as valid his patient’s self-report.

Seven years later, the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal printed a case study by Thomas Stratton that advanced a novel term for the disease: “What has been called the black lung of coal-miners…may more shortly be defined anthracosis.” Widely, if not universally, adopted by biomedical professionals on both sides of the Atlantic, Stratton’s label stuck for a century. Other British journals in the mid-nineteenth century published pathological studies that found blackened, damaged lung tissue and attributed this damage to coal dust and other underground air contaminants.¹²

By the late 1860s, a sizable literature identified a discrete clinical entity. Without question, the symptoms of anthracosis were indistinct. Shortness of breath, chest pain, and cough could accompany any number of disorders. Similarly, the gradual deterioration over many years that typified the natural history of anthracosis hardly stood out as unique. But anatomical explorers seized upon one crucial connection and held out its importance. They had traced to its source in necrotic cavities within the lungs the extraordinary black sputum often seen in the clinical setting and often remarked upon by the miners themselves. Indeed, as James Merchant and his colleagues recently observed, “Melanoptysis, the often dramatic production of several ounces of black inky sputum from a ruptured lesion, can be considered the only specific, although somewhat unusual, clinical sign of CWP [coal workers’ pneumoconiosis].” Melanoptysis made anthracosis.¹³

In the mid-nineteenth century, the pathognomonic sign of coal workers’ dust disease elicited considerable commentary. The title of William Thomson’s 1837 article—“On Black Expectoration and the Deposition of Black Matter in the Lungs, Particularly as Occurring in Coal Miners, Etc.”—fixed attention on melanoptysis, while relating this overt manifestation to internal damage. Investigators took pains to indicate that this dense black substance differed markedly from ordinary sputum speckled with dark mineral particles. Edward Greenhow described a former miner who spat up a fluid “closely resembling black paint.” Comparison to ink also recurred well before H. A. Lemen’s presentation. Moreover, British scientists commented on another sensational attribute of melanoptysis, its copious quantity. J. W. Begbie found that with one of his hospital patients, “for a period of several months, the spit-box was daily filled with a dark, heavy mass.” William Thomson dissected the lungs of a miner who for months before his death spat “a large quantity of a dark-coloured sputum.” Despite the ambiguities surrounding miners’ respiratory maladies, the pathognomonic quality of melanoptysis cast the affliction in stark terms that were neither easily dismissed nor easily confused.¹⁴

John Carpenter, a physician in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, drew on the British literature when he gave a paper at the annual meeting of the Schuylkill County Medical Society in 1869. Reviewing fifteen years’ clinical experience, Carpenter portrayed local hard-coal workers as men beset by manifold risks. Although some threats were obvious, the practitioner asserted that “it remains for the skilled professional man to trace out the predisposing and exciting causes of disease that encompass the miner in his daily surroundings—to note the effects of the altered temperature, the deprivation of sunlight, the inhalation of gases, as well as of insoluble, solid, carbonaceous material into the lungs, and the results of severe labor, for hours, in constrained and unnatural positions of the body.” He asserted that inhalation of gases and dust “must be estimated the most serious of the many causes which assail life and health in our mines.” Rather than specifying coal dust or rock dust as the sole agent of disease, Carpenter assumed that stagnant, contaminated environments harboring decaying or otherwise noxious substances gave rise to miasmas, which caused disorders of many kinds. This long-standing etiologic notion found a receptive audience, given that coal is formed from decomposed, compressed vegetable matter. The doctrine of specific etiology lay beyond the horizon of the medical profession in the North American coalfields in 1869.¹⁵

Working within the investigative mode of pathological anatomy, Carpenter linked the carbonaceous state of autopsy specimens to “the characteristic black sputa which accompany every case of bronchial or lung disease among miners.” He went on to delineate a composite clinical picture of his patients: “A peculiar asthmatic character of cough is generally noticed; emphysema is detected on physical exploration, and the sputa are black, often streaked with blood. Miner’s asthma is chronic bronchitis, with thickening of the air-passages, emphysema and nervous distress in breathing…. The black expectoration is observed for years after ceasing work in mines.” Carpenter also emphasized the “very remarkable” persistence of symptoms by citing the case of a man suffering “chronic bronchitis, with coal-dirt sputa, who has not entered a mine for nineteen years.”¹⁶

The Pottsville physician plotted the trajectory of this relentless malady. He maintained that miners’ asthma “becomes often a constitutional affection attended by great debility.” He qualified this assessment by assuring that “these chronic troubles may last a lifetime, without being rapidly fatal, or necessarily so.” Nonetheless, he had found that few anthracite workers lived past fifty-five years of age. Similarly, the “great excess of old women over old men” in mining villages struck him as remarkable. Carpenter closed his paper with a bit of underwriting advice: “I could not conscientiously advise any life insurance company to do business among miners, except on short periods of risk, and at large increas...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 They Spit a Black Substance
• 2 Twice a Boy
• 3 The Atmosphere of the Mine Is Now Vindicated
• 4 Sheep-like Acceptance of Half-Baked Statements
• 5 To Bits
• 6 Frightening Figures
• 7 Extreme Solidarity
• Notes