Exploring the Dangerous Trades

In 1943, noted industrial health expert, Dr. Alice Hamilton, published a memoir, Exploring the Dangerous Trades. Hamilton had spent her professional career fearlessly documenting the nature of dangerous industrial chemicals and toxins, working tirelessly to have them removed from the workplace. A founder of the field of industrial hygiene, Hamilton recognized the serious toll taken on health by working conditions in factories and mines.1 Martin Cherniack's The Hawk's Nest Incident, and David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz's Dyingfor Work seek to explore the history of the dangerous trades in modern America. Both suggest that health and disease are critical markers for understanding the nature of work. The "new" labor history of the 1960s and 1970s sought to move beyond traditional historical accounts of trade unionism to reflect the sociocultural "world of the worker." Nevertheless, few works in this genre explicitly directed attention to the considerable dangers of work which laborers endured. Moreover, few studies attempted to describe precisely the toll in disease and debility taken by industrial labor. These two fine books break new ground in historical attempts to understand the relationship of class, work, and disease. Although many historians have focused attention on fights concerning hours and wages, these accounts direct attention to the debates about working conditions and safety. In this respect, these books take on a critical yet relatively unexplored dimension of labor history, as well as the history of public policy and medicine. Martin Cherniack's account of the industrial disaster at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia in 1930 is thoroughly researched and closely rendered. Cherniack's narrative is a model of prospective expose. Although the story of the