Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. California State University, Long Beach’s Professor of History Dr. Caitlin Murdock will be presenting Boring into the “Mountain Sickness” Miners’ Cancers, Occupational Health, and the Discovery of Radiation Risk in Central Europe.

In the early twentieth century, physicians, public health officials, and miners in the mountainous Erzgebirge region between German Saxony and northern Bohemia began investigating a lung cancer that had been associated with the region’s miners since the sixteenth century. This paper explores how the discovery of nuclear radiation, the advent of “radium” spas, and the rise of modern social welfare protections transformed an apparently local health problem into a key to expanding occupational health protections and understanding radiation health risk in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and globally.

See you in the History of Science Room or join us over Zoom:

https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97404626072?pwd=UMHsbaiDXJegFoeDhMJa.JXaiw0IbUC.1