Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty (review)

In July 1976, twenty-seven American Legionnaires died, and another 128 were sickened following an annual convention of the organization in Philadelphia. Epidemiologists and public health officials were stunned by the mysterious outbreak and set about tracking the origins of the illness. After a number of months, the disease was traced to a bacterium that festered in the air ducts of the ventilation system of the hotel, alerting officials to the dangers that lurked in the ventilation systems of many large public facilities.

Despite the deaths and the mysteries surrounding Legionnaires' disease, as it came to be called, the awareness of the dangers of the built environment emerged in the popular and professional consciousness as a new and constant threat. Shortly after the tragedy in Philadelphia, the basements of homes in Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, the streets of Times Beach, Missouri, and countless office buildings throughout the country would be identified as potential sources for new, often vague conditions. Office workers, often, if not predominantly, women, began to argue that the offices and buildings in which they labored were the sources of headaches, eye irritations, breathing difficulties, congestion, dizziness, and a host of other complaints. In some instances, the source of birth defects and other physiological damage could be linked to a variety of chemicals that leached into the air of these buildings. But more generally, while workers themselves suspected that the synthetic materials that went into carpeting, wall coverings, and air conditioning units were hazards, neither epidemiologists nor other public health officials could clearly identify the "cause" of the complaints. Unlike the Legionnaires, whose condition was soon linked to the bacteria Legionella pneumophila, few of the complaints could be directly linked to a specific agent. In the absence of any known agent responsible for these symptoms, new conditions were soon defined: Sick Building Syndrome and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.

Michelle Murphy's book, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, puts together the various social and biological factors that went into framing Sick Building Syndrome in late twentieth-century America. In her book, she forcefully argues that the syndrome was a representation of both a biological reality and the broader social forces overtaking the late twentieth-century workplace. Here, gender, class, racism and oppression, engineering practices, and corporate science became as important for understanding the origins and meaning of illness as chemicals in the air or, for that matter, germs in the ventilation systems. For Murphy, sickness is a statement about the social relations intrinsic to these buildings.

Murphy's book begins with a discussion of the engineering ideas that led to the creation of the "controlled environments" of postwar office buildings—structures that were designed to promote production among office workers through scientific management techniques and the standardized use of space. Creation of a regimented workplace, Murphy argues, demanded control over comfort which, in turn, required the ideal of a standardized workforce. The creation of a standardized environment in turn fed a growing discontent among a workforce that was marked by gender and racial inequalities in status, pay, and class. The tensions among the workforce fed the growth of a movement among women workers that identified the buildings themselves as an embodiment of inequality and, ultimately, a source of illness.

The book then moves on to discuss the ways that the technical and scientific community sought to identify the "sources" of illness and the multifaceted ways that this effort failed in the eyes of the workforce as well as the technical class itself. As communities of working women demanded greater attention to the dangers of the built environment, their efforts clashed with the conclusions of epidemiologists and others who were chary of identifying a source that could not meet the rigors of scientific analysis. While the women themselves developed their own methodologies for identifying danger, the public health community could not. The tools of industrial hygiene and occupational medicine were inadequate...