Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science - Softcover

Sellers, Christopher C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807847984 ISBN 13: 9780807847985

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999

Synopsis

Hazards of the Job explores the roots of modern environmentalism in the early-twentieth-century United States. It was in the workplace of this era, argues Christopher Sellers, that our contemporary understanding of environmental health dangers first took shape. At the crossroads where medicine and science met business, labor, and the state, industrial hygiene became a crucible for molding midcentury notions of corporate interest and professional disinterest as well as environmental concepts of the 'normal' and the 'natural.' The evolution of industrial hygiene illuminates how powerfully battles over knowledge and objectivity could reverberate in American society: new ways of establishing cause and effect begat new predicaments in medicine, law, economics, politics, and ethics, even as they enhanced the potential for environmental control. From the 1910s through the 1930s, as Sellers shows, industrial hygiene investigators fashioned a professional culture that gained the confidence of corporations, unions, and a broader public. As the hygienists moved beyond the workplace, this microenvironment prefigured their understanding of the environment at large. Transforming themselves into linchpins of science-based production and modern consumerism, they also laid the groundwork for many controversies to come.

About this title

Book Description

"A well-written narrative history of this diverse and not very cohesive field using data gathered from a wide variety of sources. . . . Sellers is a first-rate researcher and capable writer who has succeeded in making order out of a tangled web of strands from very diverse sources."-- Journal of the History of Medicine

From the Inside Flap

This biological history of the workplace traces how a science of occupational and environmental health and the roots of modern environmentalism evolved at the crossroads where medicine and science meet business, labor, and the state.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0807847984
• ISBN 13: 9780807847985
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 350