Mining Dangers Known in Early Europe. Beginnings of Occupational Medicine

The dangers of mining and smelting metals were well known to workers in the European mining industries that were emerging in the eleventh and twelfth centuries ce. In part, concern about the dangers led to the establishment of the first guilds. One of the first guilds in Europe, for example, was founded among the silver miners of Goslar in the Harz Mountains of Germany in 1188. It was intended to help miners who became ill or to help their families if they died.

Knowledge of the dangers of mining expanded with the publication of De Re Metallica by German mineralogist Georgius Bauer, known as "Agricola" (14941556). The book concerns techniques of mining and smelting iron, silver, lead, gold, mercury, and other metals. Parts of the book deal with occupational hazards.

Agricola warned that heated rocks give off "fetid vapor" and said miners should not break rocks by fire inside a mine. He noted that mine dust could produce asthma and that if mine dust had "corrosive qualities" it "eats away the lungs and implants consumption" (Agricola 1950, 214). Agricola noted that in some regions—for example, the Carpathian Mountains— women had married as many as seven husbands, all of whom had been lost from premature death in mines.

He recommended that mine shafts be ventilated and that miners wear veils to protect themselves from dust.

Agricola also defended mining in general. "The critics say . . . that mining is a perilous occupation to pursue because the miners are sometimes killed by the pestilential air which they breathe; sometimes their lungs rot away." Agricola discounted these and other concerns. "Things like this rarely happen, and only insofar as workmen are careless," he wrote (Agricola 1950, 6). The idea that workmen are to blame for occupational disease would be repeated into the mid-twentieth century.

Beginnings of Occupational Medicine. German alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541), also known as "Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim," wrote about the diseases of miners in a book published in 1567. Educated as a physician, Paracelsus traveled throughout Europe and settled for a time in Basel, Switzerland, where he lectured on medicine. He was known for attempting to understand disease through direct observation rather than reliance on the theories of ancient physicians, but this approach put him in conflict with the medical authorities of the time.

Italian professor Bernardino Ramazzini (16331714) is considered the "father" of occupational medicine. His reputation rests on a book, De Morbis Artificum Diatriba, published in 1700, that examines the diseases and problems of fifty-two occupations. As professor of medicine at the university of Modena, Italy, Ramazzini suggested that a doctor should take a medical history by asking the great questions recommended by Hippocrates but to add one more: "What is your occupation?"

"Medicine, like jurisprudence, should make a contribution to the well being of workers and see to it that, so far as possible, they should exercise their callings without harm," Ramazzini said. "So I for my part have done what I could and have not thought it unbecoming to make my way into the lowliest workshops and study the mysteries of the mechanic arts" (Hunter 1976, 34).

In describing occupational disease in the lead mines, Ramazzini noted that the skin of miners "is apt to bear the same color of the metal. . . . Demons and ghosts are often found to disturb the miners. At first tremors appear in the hands, soon they are paralyzed" (Thompson n. d.).

Mercury is the cruelest of poisons, dealing death and destruction to miners, Ramazzini said, noting also that goldsmiths, especially those gilding silver and copper objects through a mercury process, are also susceptible. "Very few of them reach old age, and even when they do not die young their health is so terribly undermined they pray for death," he said (Hunter 1976, 297).

Ramazzini's book reflected an increasing concern for miners in parts of Europe. One of the first programs of occupational medicine for protecting worker health was established in the early eighteenth century in the mercury mines of Idria (Idrija), in what is now Slovenia.