Danger Dust

Occupational Disease and Women: From the Radium Girls to Garment Workers

All occupational diseases start somewhere. Sometimes they have a well-known history and treatment, as with certain cancers, tuberculosis, and more common stress-related ailments and fractures.

Coal miners develop pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung. Meatpacking and poultry-plant workers get repetitive stress injuries. Other occupational ailments are so specific they almost sound comical: Mad hatter’s disease, which afflicted Victorian-era hat makers who fell victim to mercury poisoning that damaged the nerves and brain (“mad as a hatter,” get it?); workers and artists who used lead-based paint and found themselves poisoned and in pain had painters’ colic; and as potters worked at their kilns, they breathed in tiny shards of silica dust, which lodged in and scarred their lungs, giving them potters’ rot.

No matter what an occupational disease is called, the reality has always been uglier. Sometimes capitalism extracts its pound of flesh metaphorically, and sometimes more literally, but it’s always the workers who pay the price.