This application is for an NLM Publication Grant to allow the applicant to complete a book on the history of occupational disease research in the United States between 1900 and 1930. The book will examine the technological, economic and social influences that led medical and other scientists to take up the study of occupational disease in this period, the intellectual and technical resources upon which they drew to assemble a new discipline, and the role that their new science came to play in the workplace. In its focus on chemical poisonings and on disciplinary formation, as well as its mode of analysis, balancing between the cognitive, social and political roots of the new science, the book will make a virtually unique contribution to the history of occupational health. The book will also offer important insights into the birth of applied biomedical disciplines, and more specifically, into the social and epistemological circumstances that gave rise to modern clinical investigation and to a growing distinction between "illness" and "disease". Additionally, it will explore the emergence of an occupational disease research community as an important episode in environmental and public health history and in the history of relations between corporations, scientific professionals, and the regulatory state. The grant will enable the principal investigator to finish the primary research begun during his dissertation work and to incorporate his new findings into a final manuscript. Additional directions of research include: estimates of rates of occupational disease in representative industries, especially after 1914; examination of the research programs of several smaller research efforts after 1914; and more systematic looks at the compensation system for occupational disease that evolved in this period, and at relations between the researchers and workers as well as engineers. The grant will finance travel to several key archives. Dr. Sellers' research base at Yale will provide library facilities, opportunities to present workshops, and interaction with his former advisors on a collegial basis. His location will also allow his access to two new consultants: Dr. Mark Cullen, a leading specialist in the contemporary science of occupational disease, and Professor David Rosner, an historian of occupational health who has an extensive knowledge of labor and government archives relevant to the subject.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter