Miners' Lung: A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining

Miners’ Lung: A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining by Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston is a 2007 book (ISBN 978-0-7546-3673-1) which is part of the Studies in Labour History series. The book argues that British coal mining is the "classic dangerous trade", and even those that escape the immediate dangers of the pit (mine collapses, explosions, suffocation) may be subject to years of pain, laboured breathing and eventual death. McIvor and Johnston relate the story of how the dust created by the picks, hammers, and pneumatic tools "crept deep into the lungs of the otherwise powerfully built, healthy workers, eventually incapacitating them, ruining their bodies and killing them".

Famous quotes containing the words history, dust, disease, british, coal and/or mining:

    The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.
    Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    The Dust did scoop itself like Hands
    And threw away the Road.
    Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

    The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)

    Quite frankly, if you bed people of belowstairs class, they go to the papers.
    Jane Clark, British millionaire politician’s wife. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 15 (June 13, 1994)

    Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
    Stephanie Coontz (20th century)