‘Occupational Exposure to Heavy Metals Poisoning: Scottish Lead Mining in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century’

Seminar conducted by Catherine Mills, Stirling University.

“Occupational Exposure to Heavy Metals Poisoning: Scottish lead mining in the centuries in the 18th and 19th centuries.”

The objective of this study is to increase the knowledge and comprehension of the historical risk of occupational exposure to lead and the incidence of poisoning in mining occupational health. The research was motivated by a recent exam of the relation between historical mining and pollution in the abandoned lead mine of Tyndrum, Southern Scottish Highlands (Mills, Simpson & Adderley). This research revealed a clear association between lead environmental values and the quantity of mineral extracted from the mine, instead of a connection with a determined period or a particular technological innovation in the history of mining production. The research also suggested that, out of the three processes carried out in the mine: extraction, ores preparation and melting, ores preparation were the ones which generated higher lead concentrations in the work environment. In some cases, the current values were 200 times higher than the past concentrations.

This revelation set out relevant questions for this job. Which grade endured the people working in the mine? Which relationship was between pollution and the workers’ health, the moderate exposure to the factors which measure the absorption such as the dose, the bioavailability and the exposure duration? In which ways can the current knowledge about lead poisoning be used to understand the problems of the past?

To allow the connection between a current environmental record and health historical events, this study comes back to Tyndrum and its workforce, confronting it from a wider national perspective wider of the 18th and 19th centuries. The traditional archive research is combined with environmental sciences and focuses on the practices of employment, technology and wider social conditions such as diet and alcohol, as well as on the poisoning of the different lead compounds (mineralogy) to which the workers were exposed.

In conclusion, it suggests an integrative approach that allows to complete the historical narrative in the absence of mortality and morbidity data. The incidence of occupational poisoning occurred in all kind of jobs related to lead mining: miners, people who prepared the mineral and smelters. The incidence was dispersed and in a low level. The relation between production and pollution was not strong, although the interrelationship between health and poisoning is related to the exposure duration to the polluted environment. This tendency was tempered by the seasonal nature of mining in the pre-industrial stage and the adoption of double occupations which minimize the contact with the metallic material and won recuperation periods for the workers.

Catherine Mills; W. Paul Adderley ‘Occupational Exposure to Heavy Metals Poisoning: Scottish Lead Mining’, Social History of Medicine, 2016 doi: 10.1093/shm/hkw084

C. Mills, P. Adderley and I Simpson, ‘The Lead Legacy: The relationship between historical mining, metallurgical practices and heavy metals contamination’ Landscape History, 35, 1, (2014), 47-72

Online broadcast http://reunion.uv.es/hcc2