Serie of seminars: 'Heavy ang Light Metals in Workplaces and the Environment'
by Judith Rainhorn Universitat Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Date: February 14 th 2018 at 4 p.m.
Place: Palau de Cerveró. Main Conferences Room.
Institut d'Història de la Medicina i la Ciència "López Piñero"
Judith Rainhorn
My paper will address the key issue of health and safety in the workplace during the industrial era, emphasizing the history of the growth, massive use and final regulation of a toxic product – white lead, responsible for heavy lead poisoning of the workers making it and the painters using it. Drawing from an empirical work through a wide range of archives which constitute the core of my present work, I will investigate the global interplay leading the occupational health and safety issue to be on the political agenda during the industrializing era.
I argue that the French State was for a century at the heart of a complex layout regarding its power to set up a healthy industrial society. Being disrupted by several revolutions and coup d’état during the 19th century (five political regimes), the French State irregularly tackled the issue of health and safety at work. Being an awe-inspiring spectre, the lead paint issue mobilised manifold stakeholders as statesmen, but also lead manufacturers, employees and unions, scientists and physicians, politicians and public opinion, and finally international organisations: all of them tried to achieve their goal – whether to prohibit lead paint or not – making their own way through the State authority. From time to time, the State (considered on different scales: government, Parliament, local authorities, etc.) took its responsibility in the implementation of environmental and health regulation, or at the contrary appeared powerless and absent from the growing health and safety stakes.
The history of lead paint and the State can serve as a historical template to reassess other health and safety issues during the 20th c.
Short Biography
Judith Rainhorn, alumna of Ecole normale supérieure (Paris), is now a Full Professor in Social History at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. After developing a comparative study on the history of international migrations (PhD, 2001), her research interests moved to environment and health stakes among urban populations in France, Europe and the US (19th-20th c.), in a comparative and transnational perspective. Her special interest is on sanitary conditions in the workplace, occupational diseases and hazards, with a specific focus on the history of occupational lead poisoning. She is also currently working on Dr. A. Hamilton, pioneering doctor for industrial diseases in the United States at the beginning of 20th century.
Her publications include books as Paris-New York : des migrants italiens, 1880-1930 (CNRS Ed., 2005), Vivre avec son étrange voisin (Rennes UP, 2010), A History of the Workplace: Environment and Health at Stake (Routledge, 2014, with Lars Bluma) and Santé et travail à la mine, XIX-XXIe s., PU Septentrion, 2014. Forthcoming is Legal Poison, on the history of occupational lead poisoning in France, 19-20th c (Presses de Sciences po, 2018).
retransmission online: http://reunion.uv.es/hcc2
Coordination: Ximo Guillem, José Ramón Bertomeu
Seminars Coordination: Enric Novella
