Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster

In the definitive history of a twentieth-century public health disaster, Alan Derickson recounts how for decades after methods of prevention were known hundreds of thousands of American miners suffered and died from black lung, a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of coal mine dust. The combined failure of government, medicine, and industry to halt the spread of this disease-and even to acknowledge its existence-resulted in a national tragedy, the effects of which are still being ...