Rayon, an Epidemic of Insanity, and the Woman Who Fought to Expose It

"In 1933, workers at a plant in Delaware began suffering breakdowns. Enter Alice Hamilton, one of history’s foremost occupational-health detectives."

"On the morning of March 11, 1933, Western Union delivered a telegram from Wilmington, Delaware, to Dr. Alice Hamilton at the Harvard Medical School that began, “RAYON FACTORY HAVING EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL CASES,” and ended, “PLEASE ANSWER QUICKLY.”

There could have been no more knowledgeable or better-placed recipient of such an urgent appeal. Alice Hamilton was a leading U.S. authority on the toxicity of carbon disulfide, the compound that appeared to be causing the rayon illnesses. Back in 1915, as a medical expert working with the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, she had studied its use in the rubber industry — though even then it was falling out of favor, in part because of its well-recognized dangers.

Hamilton had inspected nine rubber factories for the bureau. Of 16 cases of mental illness she tallied, one worker had been briefly committed to an insane asylum and several others had experienced other nervous system complaints. One man had worked for only a month before he began to show signs of derangement: “He was Hungarian and spoke no English, and the foreman did not recognize his condition until he became very much excited and unmanageable. He was sent home, and his wife reported that he acted so strangely and was so uncontrollable that she took him to a doctor. When the latter asked him about his work he told a rambling tale of lumbering down a river, and could not be convinced that he had ever worked in a rubber factory.”"

Paul David Blanc, M.D., reports for UnDark June 9, 2017.

Source: Undark, 06/13/2017