From Workers' Diseases to Occupational Diseases: The Impact of Experts' Concepts on Workers' Attitudes

The concept of occupational disease, prevalent in the Federal Republic of Germany, encompasses only a fraction of the extant dangers and injuries. Unless working conditions are taken into consideration the hazards can neither be alleviated nor recognised. This limited view of occupational health is a result of developments, in which ‘experimental hygiene’ and ‘bacteriology’ became predominant over social issues in public health. At the same time ‘occupational diseases’ have never lost their social stigma as diseases of disadvantaged groups. The assumption that occupational medicine was scientifically rather than medically based had a fundamental affect on concepts of occupational diseases. In place of ‘workers’ diseases’, which bore a direct relationship to personal suffering and the social question, ‘occupational diseases’ became the focal point, which reflected a materialist and soulless working world. This meant that the science of occupational diseases was not value-neutral but subject to the needs of an industrial capitalist society. From this point onwards, the causal connection between labour and illness was in principle no longer questioned by medical science.