Technology and Culture

Janet Greenlees's book compares the patchy track record of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American industrial cities in the realms of occupational health. The focus is on air and noise pollution, specifically within the factory environment, and the ailments that are attributable to them such as tuberculosis, byssinosis, noise-induced hearing loss, and fatigue. The textile production hubs in Lancashire in Britain and New England in the United States provide the setting for the work. The book points out that remedial action is not merely a function of the state of medical knowledge or the availability of new technologies. While they are important, there are several other structural factors that reform efforts must reckon with, from the extent to which the state can pressurize industrial employers to broader issues such as community understandings about what constitutes public and individual health hazards.

The cases presented in the book show two things: First, environmental problems on the shop floor were a subject of contention, both among workers, employers, and the state, but also between scientific and medical professionals. Second, the same health problem could generate varied responses in different localities. The former argument is amply borne out through the cases of worker fatigue, byssinosis, and hearing loss (chs. 4, 5, and 6), in which there was a lack of consensus about how factory environments were precisely implicated in physical debility. The second argument is elaborated through a comparison of the British and American experience of tuberculosis. In America, an emergent medical consensus on the link between dust in textile production environments and contagion, combined with the momentum of the progressive-era urban reforms, led to thoroughgoing remedial action on tuberculosis (ch. 3). In the British context, analogous consensus was missing among medical practitioners. Combined with the general susceptibility of the British state to manufacturers' opposition to factory regulation, efforts to remedy factory environments remained halting.

The book also shows how regulation could lag even if technological means for redressing environmental problems were available. The 1890s saw the emergence of heating and ventilation systems to improve the factory environment, but a common standard on what temperature and humidity levels would be considered safe and acceptable remained elusive. Regulatory action lagged, and such technologies were only selectively installed in firms, with motivations ranging from paternalism to production benefits, dovetailing with contemporary discussions about scientific management and Taylorism. The issue of hearing loss suffered a similar fate. In the interwar years, the [End Page 362] availability of new technologies made the measurement of the impact of long-term exposure to noise possible. But reform was slow to follow, as both the employers and unions prioritized disputes around pay, workload, etc.

Running through the book are also important threads about how workers coped with these conditions: from changing employers in search of better factory conditions and self-medication using lung tonics and cough remedies to using sign language to communicate through noisy environments. Indeed, as some of the cases point out, any changes in working conditions that did come about must be attributed to the work of unions or to individual capitalist paternalism, not to national trends. In the case of byssinosis, a belated acknowledgment of the workplace as a cause for the ailment led to the provision of compensation for victims, not the creation of dust-free environments.

Greenlees's book is a necessary corrective to the overwhelming focus on living environments in much of the literature on nineteenth- and twentieth-century public health. Placing the workplace as both a site of disease causation and subject of contentious health reform is a noteworthy historiographical move. The work would have been better served with a bit more statistics to complement its arguments. For instance, we do not get a clear sense from reading the book of how widely air-conditioning and ventilation systems were used in the mill towns, or how...