ABSTRACT
There are many situations in which workers are exposed to various chemical compounds in the work environment. Over the long history of humans, the effects of toxic compounds related to work have been studied. Hippocrates (460-377 BC) pointed out the occupation of the patient as one of the factors that should be considered in the description of the therapy and overdosages. Lead was used 6,000 years ago, and lead colic, paralysis, visual disturbance, and encephalopathy among lead workers were described in the verse by a Greek poet in the second century BC (Landrigan 1990). Mercury was used 3,000 years ago in China (Clarkson and Magos 2006). In the ¤rst century (Roman times), mercury was mined and described as a poison to all living things (Gloag 1981). In the Middle Ages, the health problems miners had were reported. The German scientist Agricola (1566) reported respiratory failure among miners, and in Italy many women had to change husbands several times because their husbands died at young ages working in a mine in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1567, Paracelsus described the etiology of miners’ disease in On the Miners’ Sickness and Other Diseases of Miners. Ramazzini published Discourse on the Diseases of Workers in 1700 and summarized occupational diseases among various workers, including miners in metal mines, doctors who used mercury as a drug, and portrait painters who used lead (Ramazzini 1983). The mining diseases occurred all over the world in addition to Europe. Similarly, Sugae, a Japanese folklorist, described that the miners working in the gold mine in Akita, Japan, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, had short lives, with few of them reaching the age of 42, and many of the women married seven or eight times because their husbands died at an early age (Jambor 1999).
