ABSTRACT
Occupational lung diseases have been a scourge whose history is as old as that of human labour, to the point that in 1915 the great industrial hygienist Edgar Collis wondered-no doubt wrongly-whether even cavemen had suffered from the most infamous of such diseases, namely silicosis. In the mid-twentieth century, eminent physicians such as Luigi Carozzi (1880-1963), the director of the International Labour Ofce’s industrial hygiene section, and George Rosen (1910-1977), a Yale University medical historian, undertook projects to identify references to these diseases in old medical texts (Carozzi, 1941-1942; Rosen, 1943; Meiklejohn, 1951-1952). Such references date back to antiquity, abounded in the seventeenth century and morphed into a dense scientic debate beginning in the nineteenth century, which was also the era of the Industrial Revolution.
