ABSTRACT
From the sociological point of view, behavioral toxicology was born when, as a result of more than 200 years of social turmoil, some dating back to the Industrial Revolution, the concept of the “quality of life” changed. In the mid- to late-nineteenth-century America, there was no general conception of problems of living. Nor were angst and maladjustment subjectively real categories of experience. One well-known method of calculating the value of a life is by evaluating the chemical elements a human being contains—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, magnesium, and some traces of iron, copper, and iodine. In 1990 on a chemical basis, the body is worth about $10. Prevention of neurotoxic illness in the environment and the workplace can thus be conceived as representing the highest stage of an evolution in our thinking about disease prevention.
