ABSTRACT
Awareness of the inuence of work conditions on human health has its beginnings in antiquity. The rst mentions of the subject are found in the ancient Egyptian encyclopaedia dating back to 1800 bc. Descriptions of pain and injuries of the spine in pyramid builders are found in Egyptian papyruses. Hippocrates (460-377 bc.) in his treatise Airs, Waters and Places described symptoms that occurred in workers extracting nonferrous metal ores. In this treatise he explicitly stressed the need to observe the patient in his or her work environment, including identifying work environment conditions as risk factors of many diseases (Gochfeld 2005).
