ABSTRACT
Few textbooks on occupational disease do not include Bernardo Ramazzini’s famous exhortation from the rst years of the eighteenth century:
When a doctor arrives to attend some patient of the working class, let him condescend to sit down, if not on a gilded chair then on a three-legged stool. He should question the patient carefully … so says Hippocrates in his work ‘Affections’. I may venture to add one more question: What occupation does he follow?
