Black and brown lung are the names given by workers in the coal and textile industries, respectively, and by some physicians and public officials, to symptoms of respiratory distress associated with dusty work. Most physicians and epidemiologists have, however, preferred to categorize these symptoms as they relate to findings at autopsy and studies of pulmonary function and to name their appearance in particular patients as, respectively, coal workers’ pneumoconiosis and byssinosis. The terms “black lung” and “brown lung” are historical legacies of intense negotiations about the causes of respiratory distress and mortality among workers in the coal and textile industries of Europe and North America, especially since the nineteenth century. (For the conventional medical definitions of the pathology subsumed under the terms black lung and brown lung, see the extensive bibliographies in papers by Fox and Stone [1981] and Corn [1980]).

History and Geography

For many centuries, medical observers, and workers and their employers, have recognized respiratory distress and its consequences as an occupational hazard among underground miners and employees of industries that generate considerable dust (notably refineries, foundries, and the manufacturing of cotton, flax, and hemp). Pliny described the inhalation of “fatal dust” in the first century. In the sixteenth century, Agricola observed that miners, physicians, and engineers were aware of shortness of breath and premature death. In the early nineteenth century, pathologists observed that some miners in Scotland had black lesions on the lung at autopsy. The term pneumoconiosis appears to have been invented in 1867. Brown lung seems to have been named by analogy with black lung, apparently in the 1960s.