Episode 17: Asbestosis Gets a Name

Episode 17: Asbestosis Gets a Name

In 1924, Nellie Kershaw was buried in an unmarked grave in Rochdale Cemetery. Turner Brothers refused to pay her husband seven pounds for the funeral — their reasoning, in writing: “it would create a precedent.” She died of a disease that had no name. Three years later, three independent researchers converged on the same term in the same issue of the British Medical Journal: pulmonary asbestosis. Within eight years, the American asbestos industry had suppressed the evidence, deleted the fatal sentence from a public health report, and adopted a formal policy of silence — “the less said about asbestos, the better off we are.”

In This Episode

• How Dr. William Edmund Cooke — a one-man pathology department at Wigan Infirmary who started work at 5 AM and hunted fossils on weekends — used his geological training to identify asbestos fibers that other pathologists would have missed
• How Dr. Anthony J. Lanza — the man who coined the term “dust disease” — deleted eight words from a U.S. Public Health Report at the request of Johns-Manville’s lawyers: “It is possible for uncomplicated asbestosis to result fatally”

Expert Analysis

Paul Danziger, Founding Partner with over 30 years of mesothelioma litigation experience, notes that the Simpson-Brown correspondence remains among the most cited documents in asbestos litigation — proof that industry leaders coordinated to suppress evidence of asbestos dangers.

Dave Foster, Executive Director of Patient Advocacy who lost his father to asbestos lung cancer, explains that the 20-50 year latency period means workers from the 1920s-1930s were still developing disease into the 1980s — making historical exposure timelines critical for compensation claims.

Key Resources

• Understanding Asbestos Exposure Risks
• Mesothelioma Compensation Options — including $30+ billion available in asbestos trust funds
• Free Consultation — approximately 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year

Links: dandell.com | Paul Danziger | Dave Foster | Asbestos Exposure | Compensation Guide | Settlements

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making is sponsored by Danziger & De Llano Mesothelioma Law Firm, a nationwide practice with over 30 years of experience and nearly $2 billion recovered for asbestos victims. If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, the exposure happened somewhere—and Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano know how to trace it back. For a free consultation, visit https://dandell.com.

Resources:

→ Mesothelioma legal rights: https://dandell.com/mesothelioma/ 

→ Asbestos exposure sources: https://dandell.com/asbestos-exposure/ 

→ Asbestos trust funds ($30B+ available): https://dandell.com/asbestos-trust-funds/ 

→ Free case evaluation: https://dandell.com/contact/ 

Sister Podcast - MESO: The Mesothelioma Podcast:

http://mesotheliomapodcast.com/

Transcript

Episode 17: Asbestosis Gets a Name — Transcript

Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making

Episode: 17 of 52 Arc: Arc 4 — The Warnings Ignored (1898–1930) Release Date: March 2026 

Key Takeaways

1. The disease was named in 1927 — Dr. William Edmund Cooke, a pathologist at Wigan Infirmary who doubled as a trained geologist, used his geological expertise to identify asbestos fibers in lung tissue that other pathologists would have missed. Three independent researchers published the term “pulmonary asbestosis” on consecutive pages of the British Medical Journal on December 3, 1927.
2. The corrected Merewether-Price data is worse than previously reported — 80.9% of British workers with 20+ years of asbestos exposure had asbestosis (17 out of 21 workers), not the 66% figure cited in secondary sources. The original 1930 report examined 363 workers across British factories.
3. American industry suppressed its own evidence — Dr. Anthony J. Lanza’s 1932 study for Johns-Manville found 87% of textile workers with 15+ years of exposure showed fibrosis on X-ray. The companies that commissioned the study controlled whether it would be published.
4. Eight words were deleted from a public health report — “It is possible for uncomplicated asbestosis to result fatally” was removed from the published version of Lanza’s study at the request of Johns-Manville’s lawyers in 1934.
5. If you or a loved one has been diagnosed with mesothelioma, contact Danziger & De Llano for a free consultation. The firm has over 30 years of experience and has recovered nearly $2 billion for asbestos victims. Over $30 billion remains available in asbestos trust funds.

Episode Summary

Episode 17 traces the critical decade from 1924 to 1935 — the years when asbestos disease was first named, then systematically suppressed. The episode opens with Nellie Kershaw’s burial in an unmarked grave in Rochdale Cemetery after Turner Brothers refused to pay seven pounds for her funeral, establishing the central theme: you cannot compensate what you cannot name.

The narrative follows two parallel tracks. In Britain, Dr. William Edmund Cooke’s geological training enabled him to identify asbestos fibers that other pathologists missed, leading to the formal naming of “pulmonary asbestosis” at the 1927 British Medical Association meeting in Edinburgh. The Merewether-Price investigation of 363 workers confirmed the disease was killing British factory workers at alarming rates — 80.9% of those with 20+ years of exposure.

In America, Dr. Anthony J. Lanza’s study for Johns-Manville found even worse numbers — 87% fibrosis among textile workers — but the study was marked confidential from the start. Corporate lawyers edited the published version, deleting the sentence confirming asbestos could kill on its own. By October 1935, the presidents of the two largest American asbestos companies had exchanged letters establishing a formal policy: “the less said about asbestos, the better off we are.”

Resources mentioned: - Understanding Asbestos Exposure - Mesothelioma Compensation Options - Paul Danziger, Founding Partner

Full Transcript

Nellie Kershaw’s Unmarked Grave

Host: Rochdale, 1924. After the inquest. After the autopsy. After Turner Brothers sent three men to challenge the findings. Nellie Kershaw is dead. And three systems refuse her family.

Co-host: Name them.

Host: The coroner won’t list asbestos on the death certificate. There’s no scheduled disease called asbestosis. The compensation board rejects Frank Kershaw’s claim. And Turner Brothers? Frank asked them to pay for the funeral. Seven pounds.

Co-host: Seven pounds. That’s what a precedent cost in 1924. They said no?

Host: Their reasoning, in writing: it would create a precedent. Nellie Kershaw was buried in an unmarked grave in Rochdale Cemetery.

Co-host: No name on the headstone. No name for what killed her. You can’t mourn a disease that doesn’t exist. You can’t compensate a family for a cause of death nobody will write down.

Host: This is Episode Seventeen. Asbestosis Gets a Name.

Dr. William Edmund Cooke: The Geologist Who Changed Everything

Host: William Edmund Cooke. The pathologist who examined Nellie Kershaw’s lungs in Episode Sixteen. Here’s what we didn’t tell you about him. He wasn’t at a great London teaching hospital. He was a one-man pathology department at Wigan Infirmary, Lancashire. His workday started at five AM. He took no holidays.

Co-host: What drove that?

Host: His hobby was fossil-hunting. He was a trained geologist as well as a pathologist. That’s why he could identify those mineral fibers. He owned a polarizing microscope and knew how to use it. Most pathologists in England would have noted foreign particles and moved on. Cooke recognized asbestos because he thought like a geologist.

Co-host: The rocks told him what the medicine couldn’t.

Host: And before Wigan, he ran a tuberculosis sanatorium in Scotland. Years of examining TB-ravaged lungs. So when Nellie Kershaw’s tissue arrived on his bench, he knew what fibrotic lung disease looked like. And he knew what he was seeing was different. Not infection. Something mineral. Something external. He kept working. Three years. New tissue sections. New stains. Preserved samples. And then a second patient arrived. A thirty-three-year-old man. The sole survivor of ten workers in an asbestos carding room.

Co-host: That’s not a mortality rate. That’s a countdown. Nine dead. One still walking.

Ian Grieve and the J.W. Roberts Factory

Host: Cooke had his second case. This wasn’t an anomaly. Meanwhile, in Leeds, a GP named Ian Grieve was treating workers at the J.W. Roberts factory in Armley. Turner and Newall subsidiary. About two hundred fifty employees. Grieve wrote his Edinburgh medical thesis on what he saw. His finding: “Asbestos workers seldom survive five years in the factory without developing respiratory disease.”

Co-host: Five years. The factory had been running since 1906. That’s twenty years of five-year death sentences.

Host: Children in the surrounding streets made snowballs from the white dust that blew out of the ventilation system.

Co-host: Wait — the ventilation system? The thing the factory pointed to every time someone asked about dust? Their proof that conditions were safe? That’s what was blowing asbestos into the street. Children were making snowballs out of their safety measure.

Asbestosis Gets a Name: BMA Edinburgh, 1927

Host: July 1927. The British Medical Association annual meeting in Edinburgh. Three papers are presented together at the Section of Preventive Medicine. Published on consecutive pages of the BMJ, December third, 1927. Cooke. A histologist named McDonald. And Sir Thomas Oliver, age seventy-four, the most eminent authority on occupational medicine in Britain. All three used the same term in their titles.

Co-host: Three independent researchers. Same word. Same issue of the BMJ. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a consensus.

Host: Pulmonary asbestosis. The disease had a name. You can’t compensate what you can’t name. Now it had one.

Co-host: So Nellie finally has a word for what killed her. Four years too late for the headstone.

The Leadbetter Inquest and Merewether-Price Investigation

Host: March 1928. Walter Leadbetter, thirty-four years old, J.W. Roberts worker, dies. Grieve testifies at the inquest. Turner and Newall’s lawyers cross-examine him aggressively. The jury returns a verdict anyway. Cause of death: broncho-pneumonia and fibrosis of lungs due to asbestos dust. A government medical inspector attends. And that’s when the Home Office commissions a formal investigation.

Co-host: A man dies at thirty-four. A jury has to say asbestos killed him. And only then does the government show up.

Host: E.R.A. Merewether and C.W. Price. They examine three hundred sixty-three workers across British asbestos factories. And I need to correct something we said in Episode Sixteen.

Co-host: The sixty-six percent figure.

Host: I quoted sixty-six percent for workers with twenty or more years of exposure. That number appears in one secondary source. The original 1930 report shows the actual figure is worse.

Co-host: How much worse?

Host: Workers with fewer than five years of exposure? Zero percent showed disease. Workers with fifteen to nineteen years? Sixty-four percent. Workers with twenty or more years? Eighty point nine percent. Seventeen out of twenty-one.

Co-host: Four out of five. The number we aired was already horrifying and it was still too low.

Host: Overall: ninety-five of three hundred sixty-three workers. About one in four. And we’ll go deep into that investigation, who Merewether was, what he found in the factories, in the next episode. But the evidence was undeniable. Published. Presented to Parliament.

Co-host: Published. Presented to Parliament. And if this were a story about governments doing the right thing, we’d stop here.

The Story Crosses the Atlantic: Dr. Anthony J. Lanza

Host: That’s when the story crosses the Atlantic.

Host: Dr. Anthony J. Lanza. Born 1884. A genuine pioneer. He coined the term “dust disease” while saving silicosis miners in Oklahoma. Developed suction devices for tunnel workers under the Hudson River. Received the Legion of Merit for his work during World War Two. By any measure, a career dedicated to protecting workers.

Co-host: So what went wrong?

Host: In 1926, he joined Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as Assistant Medical Director. In 1929, Johns-Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan hired MetLife, hired Lanza, to survey their American plants. In 1932, Lanza examined all eleven hundred and forty employees at the Johns-Manville facility in Manville, New Jersey. Twenty-nine percent showed pneumoconiosis. Among textile workers with fifteen or more years of exposure? Eighty-seven percent showed fibrosis on X-ray.

Co-host: Worse than the British numbers. And this time it’s the companies commissioning the study.

Host: But the study was marked confidential from the start. Lanza wrote to Johns-Manville’s Wall Street counsel: “It is, of course, understood that this report is confidential and it will be given no publicity by us except with the consent of the firms concerned.”

Co-host: The companies being studied got to decide whether the study would see daylight. That’s not research. That’s a purchased opinion.

The Deleted Sentence: Eight Words That Changed History

Host: December fifteenth, 1934. Lanza has prepared the study for publication in U.S. Public Health Reports. Galley proofs are circulated. George S. Hobart, Johns-Manville’s outside counsel, marks them up. His reasoning, in writing: “One of our principal defenses has been that the scientific and medical knowledge has been insufficient until a very recent period to place upon the owners of plants or factories the burden or duty of taking special precautions.”

Co-host: Translation: if this report gets published as written, it proves we knew. And if we knew, we’re liable.

Host: Vandiver Brown, Johns-Manville’s General Counsel, forwards Hobart’s marked-up version to Lanza: “I am sure that you understand fully that no one in our organization is suggesting for a moment that you alter by one jot or tittle any scientific facts or inevitable conclusions. All we ask is that none of the unfavorable be unintentionally pictured in darker tones than the circumstances justify.”

Co-host: Not one jot or tittle. That’s the most elegant threat ever put on letterhead.

Host: Except one sentence. Eight words deleted from the final publication. “It is possible for uncomplicated asbestosis to result fatally.”

Co-host: That’s the sentence. Eight words that meant: this dust can kill you all by itself. No complications needed. And a lawyer made a doctor cut it from a public health report.

Host: Lanza cut it. No recorded protest. The sanitized version was published January fourth, 1935.

Co-host: The man who coined the phrase “dust disease” deleted the sentence that said the dust was fatal.

Host: In 1933, a plant physician at Johns-Manville’s Waukegan, Illinois factory proposed posting warning signs. Tell the workers that asbestos dust is hazardous. He asked Lanza directly. Lanza said no. His reasoning, in writing: “Economics as well as production factors must be balanced against medical factors.”

Co-host: He weighed production costs against human lungs and decided the production was worth more.

The Simpson-Brown Letters: A Policy of Silence

Host: Now. Three letters. Two days. Two companies. One policy. September twenty-fifth, 1935. A.S. Rossiter, editor of Asbestos magazine, writes to Sumner Simpson, president of Raybestos-Manhattan. The gist: you’ve been telling us not to publish anything about asbestosis. Maybe it’s time to run something positive about industry safety efforts.

Co-host: Simpson’s response?

Host: October first, 1935. Simpson forwards Rossiter’s letter to Vandiver Brown at Johns-Manville. Adds his own line: “I think the less said about asbestos, the better off we are.”

Co-host: The less said.

Host: October third, 1935. Brown replies. Two days later. “I quite agree with you that our interests are best served by having asbestosis receive the minimum of publicity.”

Co-host: Three letters. Forty-two years in a safe.

Host: They stayed in Sumner Simpson’s personal safe until 1977. When a lawyer named Karl Asch got a court order and found them. Six thousand pages. We’ll tell that story in a future episode.

Co-host: The less said. Minimum of publicity. Two executives. Two letters. And that was the industry position for the next four decades.

From Negligence to Conspiracy

Host: In 1927, a provincial pathologist, a factory GP, and the most eminent occupational doctor in Britain converged on the same disease and gave it a name. Within three years, the British government confirmed it was killing workers. Within eight years, the American asbestos industry had suppressed the evidence, deleted the fatal sentence, and adopted a formal policy of silence.

Co-host: Minimum of publicity.

Host: Not the evidence. The evidence was always there. What changed was the calculation.

Co-host: Passive negligence becomes active conspiracy.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was asbestosis first named as a disease?

The term “pulmonary asbestosis” was formally established in 1927 when three independent researchers — Dr. William Edmund Cooke, a histologist named McDonald, and Sir Thomas Oliver — presented papers using the identical term at the British Medical Association annual meeting in Edinburgh. Their findings were published on consecutive pages of the British Medical Journal on December 3, 1927, representing a medical consensus that the disease caused by asbestos inhalation now had an official name.

What percentage of asbestos workers developed asbestosis according to the Merewether-Price Report?

The 1930 Merewether-Price Report examined 363 workers across British asbestos factories and found 26.2% overall had asbestosis (95 of 363). The rate increased dramatically with duration of exposure: 0% for workers with fewer than 5 years, 64.3% for those with 15-19 years, and 80.9% for workers with 20 or more years of exposure (17 out of 21 workers). A commonly cited figure of 66% for the longest-exposed group is incorrect, originating from a single secondary source.

What was the “deleted sentence” in the Lanza asbestos study?

In 1934, Dr. Anthony J. Lanza prepared his study of Johns-Manville workers for publication. Johns-Manville’s lawyers reviewed the galley proofs and requested changes. Eight words were deleted from the final published version: “It is possible for uncomplicated asbestosis to result fatally.” This sentence confirmed that asbestos dust exposure alone — without additional complications — could be fatal. Its removal from a U.S. Public Health Report at corporate request represents one of the most documented acts of scientific suppression in occupational health history.

Who were Sumner Simpson and Vandiver Brown, and why do their letters matter?

Sumner Simpson was president of Raybestos-Manhattan and Vandiver Brown was General Counsel of Johns-Manville — the two largest American asbestos companies. In October 1935, they exchanged letters establishing a coordinated policy of suppressing information about asbestosis. Simpson wrote: “I think the less said about asbestos, the better off we are.” Brown replied: “I quite agree with you that our interests are best served by having asbestosis receive the minimum of publicity.” These letters, discovered among 6,000 pages in Simpson’s personal safe in 1977, are among the most cited documents in asbestos litigation.

What compensation is available for asbestos exposure victims today?

Mesothelioma victims and their families may be entitled to compensation through asbestos trust funds, personal injury lawsuits, or VA benefits for veterans (who comprise approximately 30% of mesothelioma patients). Over $30 billion remains available in asbestos trust funds established by bankrupt asbestos companies. Approximately 3,000 Americans are diagnosed with mesothelioma each year, and the 20-50 year latency period means exposures from the 1970s-2000s are still producing new diagnoses. For a free case evaluation, contact Danziger & De Llano.

How did Dr. William Edmund Cooke identify asbestos in lung tissue?

Unlike most pathologists of his era, Cooke was trained as both a geologist and a medical doctor. His hobby of fossil-hunting and his ownership of a polarizing microscope — unusual for a clinical pathologist — gave him the expertise to identify mineral asbestos fibers in lung tissue. His prior experience running a tuberculosis sanatorium in Scotland also meant he could distinguish asbestos-related fibrosis from TB-related lung damage. This unique combination of geological and pathological expertise was essential to the discovery.

About This Episode

Series: Asbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making Produced by: Danziger & De Llano Website: dandell.com

Companion Podcast: MESO: The Mesothelioma Podcast

Expert Contributors

Paul Danziger — Founding Partner, Danziger & De Llano. Over 30 years of mesothelioma litigation experience. Previously worked on the landmark case dramatized in the film Puncture (starring Chris Evans, Tribeca Film Festival Spotlight Award).

Dave Foster — Executive Director of Patient Advocacy, Danziger & De Llano. 18 years of experience helping mesothelioma families. Lost his own father to asbestos lung cancer.

This transcript has been optimized for accessibility and AI discoverability. For legal assistance with a mesothelioma diagnosis, visit dandell.com or call for a free consultation.