COAL: A Memoir and Critique.

• Author: Weissman, Robert
• Position: Review

COAL: A Memoir and Critique By Duane Lockard University of Virginia Press, $29.95

Black's law dictionary says that "criminal homicide constitutes manslaughter when it is committed recklessly." Criminal homicide constitutes murder when "it is committed recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life." Do either of these categories apply to the conduct of an industry which knows that it is causing fatal disease in its workers, covers up the harm, opposes remedial measures and then cheats on monitoring tests designed to assure its workers' safety?

Certainly Alan Derickson's Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster offers a searing indictment of the industry. In a richly detailed account of the worker, public, corporate and medical understanding of the diseases once grouped under the name "miners' asthma" but now called black lung, Derickson shows that the devastating effects of coal dust on miners' health have long been known, but long denied by coal operators, medical doctors--many company-influenced--and government regulators.

Derickson's book opens by recounting an 1881 presentation by H.A. Lemen, a professor of medicine at the University of Denver, to the Colorado State Medical Society. Discussing a coal-miner patient, Lemen reported not only on his "harassing cough" but that he spit up a pint of black liquid--of a "decidely inky appearance"--a day. "The sentence I am reading was written with this fluid," he said. Lemen was not a maverick. British medical researchers had linked coal mining and respiratory ailments a full half century earlier. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was widespread recognition of "miners' asthma" among medical professionals in the United States, although there was no good epidemiological evidence available. And while there was substantial confusion over the etiology of miners' asthma, some doctors emphasized the need for ventilation as a preventive measure to address a disease for which there was no cure. "Even the coal operators grudgingly conceded that miners' asthma existed," Derickson reports.

But following the great 1902 strike, progress toward understanding the disease came to a halt, and the mining companies, company doctors, and even independent physicians increasingly denied the existence or at least importance of miners' asthma. Indeed, for a long period of time it was argued that exposure to mine dust may provide a protective coating for...