Search for "node"

Separate and Unequal Schools: The Past Is Future

Introduction On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish...

From Arkansas with Love: Evangelical Crisis Management and Southern (White) Gospel Music

The Best of the Martins, 2011. Gaither Gospel Series DVD cover. © Slanted Records and The Martins. For the past forty years or so, "southern gospel" has named a professional...

Wild Notes: A Review of Dawoud Bey’s Elegy

Introduction One night in the spring of 2006, I found myself on the edges of Richmond, Virginia’s Shockoe Bottom neighborhood with a group of reluctant adolescents from my church youth...

The Shenandoah Valley

The Shenandoah Valley Edward Beyer, Digital Restoration of "Harper's Ferry from Jefferson Rock" from Album of Virginia: Illustrations of the Old Dominion, 1858. The Shenandoah Valley's history marks it as...

Lyle Saxon and the WPA Guide to New Orleans

Essay Canal Street, Separating the Old from the New City, from the WPA Guide to New Orleans. Reminders of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal are hard to miss in many American...

New Shades o'Death Creek

Excerpt Set in West Virginia, this excerpt from Giardina's novel of time-space travel, Fallam's Secret (2003), evokes the physical and emotional landscapes of mountaintop removal in the southern Appalachians. On...

James Holland, Riverkeeper: Environmental Protection along the Altamaha

Essay Nancy Marshall, Moon over Darien River, Georgia, 2010. I have a story about a crab that started a movement. It is about a river that is stunning in its...

Brushes with War

Review The Assessment (Spc. Nick Weishaar), 2012, Oil on board by Victor Juhasz. Reproduced by permission of "The Joe Bonham Project." Created in cooperation with the Metropolitan Museum of Art...

Still Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease

Preface Digging Our Own Graves, first published in 1987, concluded with an ominous prediction: "Black lung disease awaits the younger generation of coal miners who are now at work underground."...

References
1.	The language of "miners' wives and widows" implies that all miners are male. However, since at the least the 1970s, women have worked in the mines, including underground, albeit in small numbers. I use the language of "wives and widows" because most black lung activists use this language in their organizing and their discussion of black lung compensation (e.g., "widows' claims").
2.	See Daniel M. Fox and Judith F. Stone, "Black Lung: Miners' Militancy and Medical Uncertainty, 1968–1972," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 54, no. 1 (1980): 43–63, for an early framing of the black lung struggle as between miners and physicians over the definition of disease. Their emphasis on medical uncertainty differs from the analysis in my own article, which came out during the same time period: Barbara Ellen Smith, "Black Lung: The Social Production of Disease," International Journal of Health Services 11, no. 3 (1981): 343–359.
3.	Journalistic and some scientific accounts equate coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) with black lung. However, an essential component of the black lung movement was miners' and their families' struggle to broaden the definition, beyond CWP, of miners' disabling, occupationally related lung disease. Research by physicians and other scientists familiar with and sympathetic to miners and their health has validated this broader definition. See, for example, Edward L. Petsonk, Cecile Rose, and Robert Cohen, "Coal Mine Dust Lung Disease: New Lessons from an Old Exposure," American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 187, no. 11 (2013): 1178–85.
4.	This estimate of the number of black lung beneficiaries is extrapolated from data on the number of claims filed each year, changing approval rates, the annual total cost of claims, and, for some years, reports from the administering federal agency. See, for example, Social Security Administration, Annual Statistical Supplement to the Social Security Bulletin, 2016 (Washington, DC, 2017), Table 9. Beneficiaries who are miners and those who are widows, added together, do not equal the total number of miners judged disabled by black lung, as a widow may receive her husband's benefits after his death. Further, the number of beneficiaries is reported each year as a rolling total, and thus cannot be summed. The coronavirus interrupted my efforts to obtain more precise data. As of December 2018, an individual beneficiary is entitled to receive $660/month, which increases up to a maximum of $1,320 for those with three or more dependents. US Department of Labor, Division of Coal Mine Workers' Compensation, "Benefit Rates Under Part C, 1973–2018," accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.dol.gov/owcp/dcmwc/statistics/PastPartCBenefitRates.htm.
5.	Sam Roberts, "Dr. Donald L. Rasmussen, Crusader for Miners' Health, Dies at 87," New York Times, August 2, 2015, accessed September 29, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/health/research/dr-donald-l-rasmussen-crusader-for-coal-miners-health-dies-at-87.html.
6.	Dr. Cohen testified during the hearings on black lung, "Breathless and Betrayed." See "What is MHSA Doing to Protect Miners from the Resurgence of Black Lung Disease?" YouTube video, 2:58:39, June 20, 2019, House Committee on Education and Labor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJUDcTf0a_g.
7.	NIOSH, Criteria for a Recommended Standard: Occupational Exposure to Respirable Coal Mine Dust, publication no. 95–106 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1995), xxii, https:// www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/95-106/default.html.
8.	Austyn Gaffney, "As Black Lung Strikes Younger Coal Miners, Kentucky Restricts Medical Benefits," NRDC, September 24, 2018, accessed September 29, 2018, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/black-lung-strikes-younger-coal-miners-kentucky-restricts-medical-benefits.
9.	This summary of miners' perspectives on the origins of black lung and the role of physicians in advocating a restrictive view of work-related, compensable disease is based on the author's interviews and observations in southern West Virginia at different moments during the past five decades.
10.	Howard S. Berliner and J. Warren Salmon, "The Holistic Health Movement and Scientific Medicine: The Naked and the Dead," Socialist Review 9, no. 1 (January–February 1979): 31–52.
11.	See Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951). Parsons's conceptualization of the sick role was neither class nor historically specific.
12.	Author's interview with Danny Whitt, Matewan, WV, September 4, 2019.

Search Results for node