 and take time for the symptoms to present because lungs have a kind of excess capacity, but once this excess is gone, the symptoms grow worse very quickly. Before it was understood, the symptoms were often missed because it was often seen in conjunction with tuberculosis and pneumonia. In 1824, the death of Nellie Kershaw, who had worked spinning asbestos into yarn, led to an inquest in which the pathologist Edmund Cook identified minerals found in Kershaw's lungs as the primary cause of the fibrosis of the lungs and therefore of death.