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2 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE AND EVOLUTION OF THE RATIONALE OF INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE PRACTICE

      The aim of this chapter section is not to document or present chronologically the major past contributors to worker health and their relevant works, or the events and episodes that gave urgency to the development of industrial hygiene as a science and a profession. Rather, the purpose of this section of this chapter is to place in perspective the history and evolution of industrial hygiene from the early works of pioneers in the field through the major periods of change in the last 100 years, which led to the contemporary practice of industrial and occupational hygiene and the current rationale for practice.

      The field of industrial hygiene has its roots in the profession of public health. Merriam‐Webster's Dictionary defines public health as “the art and science dealing with the protection and improvement of community health by organized community effort and including preventive medicine and sanitary and social science.” The term public health was first used early in the seventeenth century. The term industrial hygiene to identify a profession or field of work largely originated in the twentieth century. One must go further back in history, however, to find the root origins of the terminology. The term “industry,” with a dictionary meaning, “systematic labor for some useful purpose or the creation of something of value,” has its English origin in the fifteenth century. The word “hygiene” goes back to much earlier times. Hygieia, a daughter of Asklepios who was god of medicine in Greek mythology, was responsible for the preservation of health and prevention of disease. Thus, the roots of the term industrial hygiene (like occupational hygiene) mean preservation of health and prevention of disease among people engaged in systematic labor for some useful purpose or the creation of something of value.

      In the public health context, then, the purpose of industrial hygiene is to protect the health of communities of workers. The modern definition of industrial hygiene includes protection of the health of persons living around a place of work from hazards that may arise from that place of work, and in more recent decades, the environment of the community at large.

      Occupational diseases and the deaths of workers have been documented for more than 2000 years. In the fourth century BCE, lead toxicity was recognized and recorded by Hippocrates. In the first century CE, Pliny the Elder, a Roman scholar, recognized the dangers of dealing with zinc and sulfur and described a bladder derived mask for workers to protect them against dust and lead fumes. In the second century, Galen, a Greek physician, recognized the dangers of acid mists to copper miners. The association between work and disease was recognized, but knowledge of the causative agent, including the toxicity of materials, the hazards of physical and biological agents, and the ergonomic stressors encountered in industry did not exist in those very early times. With few exceptions, the earliest attention given to worker health was in applying the knowledge at hand, which was primarily the recognition and treatment of illnesses associated with a job.

      During this early period, workplace exposures were often significant, leading to a high prevalence of diseases and excess deaths. There were no major advances until 1473 when Ulrich Ellenborg published a pamphlet on occupational disease and gave instruction on hygiene. In 1538, Paracelsus, a Swiss alchemist, published considerable material on the toxicology of smelting metals (some of which was later determined to be incorrect) but his work led to the observation, “No substance is a poison by itself, it is the dose that makes a substance a poison,” (2) which formed the basis for the science of toxicology. The first scientific approach to occupational health was by Agricola in Latin in 1556 (3) and more than a century later, in 1700, Bernardo Ramazzini, an Italian physician, published a treatise on occupational disease, De Morbis Artificum, and coined the phrase still asked by occupational physicians, “Of what trade are you?” (4)

      Although diseases caused by conditions of work have been recognized and treated for many hundreds of years, it was not until around the turn of the twentieth century that major efforts began to be directed toward what we now think of as fundamental industrial hygiene – the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of workplace health hazards to prevent occupational disease. Scientists and practitioners, including engineers, chemists, and physicists, began to apply their knowledge and skills toward the development of methods and procedures for identifying, measuring, and controlling exposures to harmful airborne dusts and other chemical agents in workplaces. At that time, there were no consistent procedures for carrying out these activities.

      Toward the mid‐twentieth century, management, labor unions, government, academia, and other groups took an increased and substantial interest in worker health and in the control of exposures to stresses in places of work. These external drivers of the progression of the field of industrial hygiene, along with the setting of standards for exposure limits, created a broad support for expanding knowledge and practice to prevent illnesses and diseases associated with on‐the‐job exposures.

Today, the theory and practice for anticipating, recognizing, evaluating, and controlling exposure to on‐the‐job and progressively off‐the‐job chemical, physical, and biological health hazards, as well as emerging research related to other environmental, physiological, psychological, and behavioral health hazards, define occupational/industrial hygiene. Industrial hygienists (IHs), together with a wide range of allied professionals, work to protect the health of persons exposed to workplace and community stressors.

      2.1 The Early 1900s

      During the early history of industrial development, a lack of knowledge of the effects of health stressors associated with industrial operations and how these could be controlled, with the concomitant substantial exposures to toxic materials in many places of work, led to serious episodes of illness, disease, and death among workers.

      It was not until around the beginning of the twentieth century that specific attention began to be devoted to the preventive aspects of occupational illnesses. Early progress in Great Britain was made with dusts being a focus of such occupational and industrial hygiene efforts, as featured in the text Dangerous Trades by Oliver in 1902 (5). The 1916 text in the US edited by Kober and Hanson entitled Diseases of Occupational and Vocational Hygiene provided a contemporary view of the state of industrial hygiene in the United States at the time (6).

      In the early 1900s, the major thrust in the control of workplace health stressors was directed toward those areas in industry having massive exposures to highly toxic materials. The professional talents of engineers, chemists, physicians, physicists, and statisticians were largely used in these efforts.

      During this time, scientists and practitioners including engineers, chemists, and physicists, began to apply their knowledge and skills toward the development of methods and procedures for identifying, measuring, and controlling exposures to harmful airborne dusts and other chemical agents in workplaces. A general example is the high incidence of silicosis and silicotuberculosis that existed a century ago among workers in hard rock mines, the granite industry, and in tunneling operations, wherever the dust had a high free silica content. During this early period, the major effort on behalf of workers' health was to apply the knowledge at hand, which related primarily to the recognition and treatment of occupational illnesses.

      There were several early efforts at organizing the profession in the United States during this time. The American Public Health Association (APHA) started a section on Industrial Hygiene in 1914, the US Public Health Service (USPHS) organized a division of Industrial Hygiene and Sanitation in 1915, and a group of occupational physicians formed the American Association of Industrial Physicians and Surgeons in 1916. The Journal of Industrial Hygiene in the United States was initially published in 1919, and the Harvard Schools of Public Health and Engineering established a program in 1927 for industrial sanitation that was important to the development of the industrial hygiene profession (7).

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