Evidence of early awareness of asbestos cancer threat in 1928 poem


Edwin Rolfe is largely a forgotten poet today, but 'Asbestos', one of the poems he wrote in the early years of the last century, demonstrates knowledge of the facts we now know about the substance.

I'm not sure if he's out of copyright yet, so I'll not quote the poem in its entirety here, but it can be found on the internet. It's short, only twelve lines long, and shows a man, John, who worked with the substance in what seems to be the moment of his death from one of the related diseases, perhaps mesothelioma.

The poet himself was exposed to the effects of the Great Depression, was grounded in left-wing thought, and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was not afraid to speak out in defence of the workers, and one critic wrote that he "fought stubbornly for the way to name the new thing that a degenerate age had created." A factory system that drove John and others like him to work in an atmosphere polluted by the fatal fibres could justifiably be described as degenerate.

Turning to the poem, we see the opening lines show poverty, resulting in lack of knowledge and lack of options, driving John to be a "workhorse". It's possible to see this complex sentence, winding on right into the second stanza, as trying to recreate the confusion that this poverty causes - it's a difficult sentence for us to read, just as it's a difficult situation for John to be in.

And then we see the asbestos dust so thick on his skin that it turns to cement on his body when he sweats, making a building of him: "he saw his sweat cement the granite tower / (the edifice his bone had built)". Outside the title, this is the only mention of the substance, and the poem had several titles, none so explicit, before Rolfe settled on this one. We are not given the full information, as those who risked the industrial disease were not, and invited to recognise the fibres through empathy, thus sharing his pain.

And the final lines make clear the pain, as the strong man's body is described as a bed: " the posts are made of bone, the spring of nerves, / the mattress bleeding flesh." Beds are immobile, and have things lie upon them, which is shown to tie into the breathlessness and lack of energy that results from the sufferer's disease.

The very air itself, which would be expected to act as a relief, or a cure, for the restricted lungs is presented instead as a pillow, and as a pillow pressing on his emaciated face, smothering him while a vulture hovers overhead. It is not subtle imagery - but it is telling, and that this poem was first published in 1928 shows how clearly and how early the effects of mesothelioma or asbestosis had been recognised.

It would be too much to pretend that all medical advances and personal injury law progresses from this poem, but it is a detail in the growing understanding through the 20th century that those who had been exposed to asbestos had been exposed to a dangerous substance, and deserved better. It is the growing realisation of this that led to the current state of affairs, in which asbestos-related conditions are widely accepted as deserving of compensation.


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