In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon by Paul David Blanc
  • Mark Aldrich (bio)
Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon
By Paul David Blanc. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Pp. 309.

This is an important, deeply researched contribution to the history of the occupational diseases stemming from the manufacture of rayon and cellophane. Relying on archives and an impressive knowledge of primary resources in several languages, Paul David Blanc traces the story from earliest beginnings to the present. Although the manufacture of these products involves several hazardous chemicals, the main villain in the drama is carbon disulfide (CS2), which exists in nature but was synthesized in a laboratory in the late eighteenth century. Its first use, in the 1840s, was as an anesthetic, for which it fortunately proved unsatisfactory, since experiments soon demonstrated it would kill laboratory mice. But CS2 proved a potent solvent, useful in electroplating and, more importantly, in cold-process vulcanization of natural rubber.

By the 1850s, alarm bells were ringing in the French rubber industry. It was found that CS2 exposure might lead to mental derangement, similar to late stage syphilis and a host of physical and psychological neurological symptoms ranging from muscle weakness to inappropriate sexual arousal. German literature on CS2 also appeared in the nineteenth century, and a few cases of poisoning were observed in British and American rubber workers. While CS2 has had a minor career as a pesticide helping to save the French wine industry, by 1900 it was being engineered out of the rubber trade and into “fake silk.” Several processes might make viscose, but the use of CS2 to liquefy cellulose (the outcome of work by Arthur D. Little) won out. As soon as the industry became international, the damaging health effects of CS2 emerged.

Beginning in the 1880s, rayon and later cellophane production expanded in Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe, Italy, and Japan. The author presents many clinical studies documenting that workers in these countries being exposed to CS2 suffered serious consequences–now found to include Parkinsonism and serious eye damage (keratitus). Unfortunately, Blanc does not state why these risks evolved or how common they were in rayon workers as a group. Even a rough table of exposure numbers in the industry or levels by time and country, combined with the author’s expertise on what such exposures imply, would have been enormously helpful.

In the United States, Pennsylvania was a major rayon producing state and in the 1930s its “little new deal,” with support from Alice Hamilton and the Federal Bureau of Labor Standards, generated the first major American study of rayon workers’ poisoning. Here, as elsewhere, the author has an eye for chilling detail: a researcher investigating mental institutions near a producer in Pennsylvania learned that “there had been much [End Page 980] more insanity . . . since the rayon factory had come there” (p. 95). While no regulations emerged, Philip Drinker of Harvard, who represented the viscose producers, suggested 30 parts per million (ppm) as an exposure ceiling. DuPont had adopted ten ppm, while European standards were then “thirty to forty times as large” (p. 106). The author takes the story to the present and briefly notes the industry’s move to China and India where CS2 risks are probably higher than in the west. In the 1980s, based on a National Institutes of Occupational Health assessment suggesting an exposure limit of one ppm, OSHA proposed a four-ppm standard. Long contentious hearings ensued, and a court appeal struck down this and other health regulations. The present standard is twenty ppm.

Fake Silk is a powerful and important book, yet the immense amount of detail is tangential to the book’s theme and sometimes obscures it. Chapter subheadings would also have helped the reader, while some introductory paragraphs lead nowhere. For example, chapter 6, “The Heart of the Matter” is about the discovery of a link between CS2 and heart disease, but the first two paragraphs say nothing of that topic, which only appears thirteen pages later. I also wish the author had offered an overview of how...

pdf

Share