ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

’Pneumoconiosis Research and the Changing Significance of the Coal Miner's Body in Britain'

• In Event: Science at the End of Empire: Britain’s Studies of the Body

English Abstract

In 1953, medical experts launched the world’s largest field study of diseases related to coal dust. The Pneumoconiosis Field Research (PFR) programme examined over fifty-thousand miners through medical examinations, social surveys, and autopsies. This work was sponsored by the National Coal Board – the nationalised industry responsible for extracting and supplying Britain’s coal. The research from the PFR contributed to the Coal Board compensating workers for their ill-health. It also travelled overseas, underpinning an international safety standard for dust in mines adopted by countries like India and the U.S. However, in the 1990s, the Coal Board became privatised and pre-existing commitments to compensation fell under new scrutiny. In a remarkable turnaround, the privatised coal industry entered into a legal battle with miners to challenge the same scientific research that its nationalised predecessor had funded and promoted. The miners eventually secured victory in the courtroom; but the delays in compensation arrived before many suffering from coal-related illness could receive it.
This paper follows the scientific research on pneumoconiosis to explore contests about chronic occupational disease between the state, companies, and workers in the twentieth century. It argues that the privatised coal industry’s later attacks on the data that underwrote compensation did not just follow from a desire to save money but reflected a wider assault on the ideals of stewardship that lay behind nationalisation (however imperfectly it had been enacted). In other words, as in the past, the science of coal-related sickness continued to be shaped by wider political and social currents.

Author

• Andrew Seaton, University College London