Trends in employee health service : Margaret F. McKiever, editor.

  • United States. Public Health Service. Division of Occupational Health
Date:
1965]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Trends in employee health service : Margaret F. McKiever, editor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    3. Medical and surgical care to restore health and earning capacity as promptly as possible following industrial accident or disease. Quoted from American Medical Association, Council on Industrial Health: “Medical Service in Industry: Outline of Procedure for Physicians in In- dustry; Industrial Health Examinations.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 118: 895 (Mar. 14) 1942; 125: 569 (June 24) 1944. Industrial hygiene is concerned with every phase of the health of the man behind the machine, whether it is the industrial dust in the air he breathes or the food his wife has packed in his dinner pail. In short, it is the problem of keeping the worker on the job, and in good health, so that he can work at top efficiency. Quoted from Townsend, James G.: “The Problem of Industrial Hygiene.” New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal, 95: 505 (May) 1943. _ As [industrial] hygienists, you hold an important place in industry and public health in the control of occupational and traumatic diseases primarily the result of chemical and physical agents. Through your training and knowledge of certain basic sciences and in cooperation and consultation with the plant physician you have introduced engineering principles, safety and sanitary sciences, toxicology and control tests, to develop an environment as a safe place for the worker; this is a job that demands eternal vigilance to curtail morbidity and mortality, with emphasis on logical reasoning and observations. ... Indus- trial hygiene and epidemiology are absolutely essential in preventive industrial medicine and cannot be divorced. Quoted from Legge, Robert T.: “A Historical Background of Industrial Hygiene.” American Industrial Hygiene Association Quarterly, 7: 4 (June) 1946. Some advances have recently been made but the conception of indus- trial medicine in this country has, on the whole, remained circum- scribed. In some parts of the country it has not developed far beyond its initial interest in traumatic surgery to patch up the injured worker. As workmen’s compensation laws have been passed in various States, industrial medicine has centered on accident prevention, in which industrial physicians participate along with safety engineers. When occupational diseases came within the province of the workmen’s com- pensation acts, their control became one of the functions of the indus- trial physician working with industrial toxicologists and engineers. It is only within recent years that the scope of industrial medicine has come to embrace broader aspects of health promotion and sickness prevention, including nutrition and psychiatry. ... With fuller collaboration of the medical profession, of employers and labor, and of the government, industrial medicine can play a preventive and a curative role far beyond its present scope. Quoted from Stern, Bernhard, J.: Medicine in Industry. New York, The Commonwealth Fund, 1946, pp. 185-186.