Structuring silence: asbestos and biomedical research in Britain and South Africa

Abstract

Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, asbestos-induced diseases began to attract widespread attention as a result of labour activism, media coverage, government regulation, scientific research and extensive litigation in North America and Europe. The consequences of asbestos mining and manufacture in producer countries, such as South Africa, where the multinational industry operated, however, remained largely invisible internationally. Historians of the asbestos industry have demonstrated that suppression and manipulation of scientific knowledge played a central role in the industry's efforts to escape accountability. What has been neglected are the ways in which mainstream asbestos researchers in the early twentieth century separated the physiological from the social context of disease in both the metropole and the colonies, thereby narrowing understandings of disease causality. It is argued here that narrow concepts of disease allowed for limited visibility and, in Britain, fostered prevention policies based on technical `solutions'; whereas, in the racially segregated society of South Africa, a narrow notion of causality rendered asbestos-induced diseases almost completely invisible — as they still are today.