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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.1 (2003) 164-171



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The Unbearable Heaviness of Lead

Ellen Silbergeld


Peter English. Old Paint: A Medical History of Childhood Lead-Paint Poisoning in the United States to 1980. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. xv + 254 pp. Ill. $69.00 (0-8115-2987-5).

Why was this book written? Like Brush with Death, by Christian Warren (reviewed in Bull. Hist. Med., 2001, 75: 823-25), Old Paint treats the history of childhood lead-paint poisoning over the past hundred years. Peter English, like Warren, draws upon access he obtained as an expert in litigation (both authors acknowledge this engagement): English was retained by the lead industry, while Warren served as an expert on behalf of several cities seeking compensation from industry. (The reader of this review should be warned that I am cited by both authors and have also participated in this legal contest, as an expert for New York City and Baltimore in lawsuits against the lead industry.) In actuality, Old Paint represents only the latest phase in the struggle for control over the story of childhood lead-paint poisoning. For most of the last century, the lead industry was particularly alert to the importance of this strategy. A highly integrated industry in the United States, the lead producers early in the twentieth century organized themselves explicitly to defend their products against the growing scientific and popular concerns over this toxic metal. Long before Big Tobacco, the lead industry understood the inestimable value of purchasing "good science." To that end the Lead Industries Association, as well as precursor and subsequent lead industry organizations, made substantial and continuing investments in research and researchers to ensure its hegemony over medical opinion. Thus books [End Page 164] like Old Paint and Brush with Death are outside the tradition embodied in histories of industries and industrialists, as noted by Erica Schoenberger. 1

We can expect an increased production of books like these as a consequence of the rise of toxic tort litigation. This relatively new case law has developed from the opening of legal remedies in the context of environmental risks, circumventing the legal limits still imposed on workers seeking redress of damages due to chemical exposures. Suits by communities exposed to hazardous waste have been recorded most eloquently in print and film in Jonathan Herr's A Civil Action. Suits over lead poisoning began about the same time, in the 1980s, as individual causes of action by children and their guardians against the owners of property where children were poisoned by lead paint. However, the costs of lead-paint poisoning have fallen more heavily upon those cities, like Baltimore, that have attempted to respond to the crisis of health and housing. Since those most at risk for lead-paint poisoning are the urban poor, the costs are directly borne by public health and housing agencies. Lead-damaged children impose additional costs on society, in terms of special education needs, unemployment, and increased risks of criminal behavior, as documented by Rick Nevin and others. 2 For that reason, among others, cities like Boston, New Orleans, New York, Providence, and Baltimore in the 1990s brought legal actions against the lead industry to recover these costs. For a variety of legal issues relating to class certification and market share arguments, these suits have met with limited success in the courts.

Historians are now taking the struggle to a broader audience; in addition to Warren and English, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz have also recently weighed in with a history of the lead industry in the twentieth century. 3 For the historian of medicine and science, it may appear that the discovery process in toxic tort litigation will open up new sources of primary data. However, the ground rules and motivations of legal discovery introduce distortions into the field of inquiry that must be recognized and distinguished from the properly omnivorous nature of historical research in its quest for definitive rather than selective narratives. It would be useful to the rest of us for all of...

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