|
Professor of History
John.Heitmann@notes.udayton.edu
|
|
Recent Scholarship & Works in Progress
|
Warren, Christian. Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning. xvi + 362 pp. Illus., fig., tables, app., index. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. $45. Christian Warren's Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning is an ambitious attempt to trace the 20th century history of lead poisoning in America. As such, it focuses on a timely and important topic. Yet, despite the author's claims of a comprehensive social and cultural approach integrating three different yet interrelated modes of lead exposure -- occupational, pediatric, and environmental (universal) -- this work is at best uneven, at times superficial, and in several instances interpretively incorrect. The author divides his chronological account into three sections, beginning with a description of a turn of the century America that was largely enamored by, yet oblivious to, the dangers of white lead carbonate in the workplace and home. In the second part of the book, this prevailing mentality was challenged, however, as Warren highlights the efforts of Progressive Era reformer Alice Hamilton and other industrial hygienists. Concluding chapters examine post-WWII developments in pediatric and environmental lead toxicology. The author asserts that a "silenced" epidemic of occupational and childhood lead poisoning, suppressed largely by the dominance of industrial interests, gave way to the activists' "screaming" epidemic of the 1960s. In closing chapters, the author's initial ideological balance wavers as he sketches the coming of regulation, the emergence of controversial low-level studies, the subsequent redefinition of childhood lead poisoning, and an ultimate failure to bring this issue to closure. At the heart of Warren's recounting of this episode are individuals, and his weaving of biographical detail into the narrative is one of the book's strong points. In addition to industrial hygienists Hamilton and Carey McCord, researchers Joseph Aub, Robert Kehoe, Julian Chisholm, Clair Patterson, and Herbert Needleman, as well as Lead Industries Association (LIA) employees Felix Wormser and Manfred Bowditch, play prominent roles in the story. Warren contends that it is these individual's negotiations aimed at balancing the perceived needs of industry and consumers that define acceptable risk at any one time in the past. Therefore, Warren concludes that all parties tied to these negotiations -- manufacturers, government, and consumers -- share the financial responsibility for what he sees is a current crisis, a nation contaminated and poisoned by lead that was put there by the paint and tetraethyl lead manufacturers. Warren's idealistic conclusion is weak, however, given an analysis that sometimes never goes beyond the surface of an inherently complex topic. For example, in several instances, the author confidently discusses the International Labor Organization's White Lead Painting Convention No. 13 of 1921 as evidence of America's unwarranted commitment to white lead. Further examination on this topic, however, reveals that not only was the Convention in part motivated and influenced by post-Versailles Treaty international politics and economics involving France, Germany and Poland, but it was also filled with so many interpretive loopholes and non-existent enforcement policies that the restrictions were anything but "sharp." Secondly, Warren consistently fails to distinguish the conflicting interests of metallic lead, pigment, and paint manufacturers. Yet, these differences are particularly important when discussing the LIA, its membership, and organizational commitments. In addition, conspicuously absent from the author's narrative are key subjects that should
be considered carefully, including changes in paint technology, painter and consumer
preferences, methods of blood lead analysis, and notions of physician and parental
responsibilities. And finally, while the book's cover suggests that this is a story about paint, two
chapters focus on tetraethyl lead, with puzzling and unresolved conclusions concerning the
contribution of tetraethyl lead to childhood lead poisoning statistics. Given that there surely
existed other sources of lead poisoning -- from water, for example -- this reader was left in a
quandary concerning the key issue of responsibility and redress at the monograph's conclusion.
John A. Heitmann Department of History University of Dayton Dayton, OH 45469-1540
|
|