Jock McCulloch (1945–2018): A Tribute

Original Article Jock McCulloch (1945–2018): A Tribute International Journal of Health Services 0(0) 1–6 ! The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0020731418780607 journals.sagepub.com/home/joh Geoffrey Tweedale1 and Barry Castleman2 Abstract Jock William McCulloch, who died at Melbourne, Australia, in January 2018, was one of the foremost historians of occupational health of his generation. This tribute reviews his career and oeuvre, which was tragically ended by his death from mesothelioma. Keywords Agent Orange, asbestos, gold, silicosis, mesothelioma, South Africa Jock William McCulloch died at Melbourne, Australia, on January 18, 2018. As a professor of history at RMIT University at Melbourne (the city in which he was born), he had established a reputation as one of the foremost historians of occupational health of his generation. He had studied fine art for a number of years but later enrolled as a mature student at Monash University. In 1978, he completed a PhD on Frantz Fanon, the West Indian psychoanalyst, social philosopher, and revolutionary. This seeded Jock’s interest in colonization, race relations, and psychiatry – subjects on which he would write several books. Like the industries he studied so closely, Jock McCulloch was an internationalist. But his first works on medicine and occupational health were focused on Australia. In 1984, he published a monograph on Agent Orange. It followed a blueprint he would adopt for many of his subsequent writings. It involved 1 Stockport, UK Garrett Park, Maryland, USA 2 Corresponding Author: Geoffrey Tweedale, 16 Heysbank Road, Disley, Stockport SK12 2BJ, UK. Email: [email protected] 2 International Journal of Health Services 0(0) a toxic chemical (in this case the defoliant used in the Vietnam War); the impact of that chemical on the environment and individuals; and the role of the government and manufacturers. A third of the monograph was devoted to the history of the Australian veterans’ struggle for recognition, understanding, and compensation for the illnesses caused by exposure to the herbicide. In clear, jargon-free prose, the book showed how the interests of the political establishment, commerce, the military, and the medical profession had converged to ruin the lives of so many of the soldiers who had fought in the war. The overarching theme of The Politics of Agent Orange – as with much of Jock’s subsequent work – was social justice.1 In 1984, he was appointed to a visiting fellowship at the Social Justice Project (Australian National University) and tasked with writing a history of Aboriginal health. That led him to an Aboriginal community at Baryugil, New South Wales, which was the location of an asbestos mine. Jock recognized that, to understand that small community, it was necessary to explore the history of the asbestos industry in Australia (which also involved another mine at Wittenoom). His interest was timely: asbestos was emerging at the start of the 1980s as a major political, legal, and human issue. Litigation was highlighting the role of key manufacturers, such as the leading Australian asbestos company James Hardie; it was also cracking the carapace of company archives. Jock’s conclusion in Asbestos: Its Human Cost was that the best means of defense against the unfolding disaster (and future problems) was a vigilant workforce and skeptical public.2 Looking back later, he wrote to Laurie Kazan-Allen of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat about James Hardie. The firm employed Aboriginal workers “in the sort of conditions only found in South Africa under apartheid.” Comparing the reputation of James Hardie before and after its record received scrutiny, he wrote: In 1984 James Hardie was a greatly respected Australian company which had dominated the building materials market for the best part of a century. It is now probably the most reviled commercial enterprise in the country. That shift is the result of litigation which had revealed its predatory behaviour toward employees, consumers of its products and by-standers it has injured. One positive outcome is that community awareness of the dangers of asbestos exposure has improved.3 Like many scholars who have worked on asbestos, he found that the subject has no academic end date. In the acknowledgements to his next book, Asbestos Blues (2002), he related how he became involved again.4 He had been working in the South African National Archives on a history of sexual crime: It was one of those dull afternoons all too familiar to anyone who haunts such places. To fill in time I keyed the word asbestos into the catalogue and came up Tweedale and Castleman 3 with more than six hundred references. Having spent ten minutes looking through a handful of files I decided to work on this book. Asbestos Blues is a forensic examination of the South African asbestos mining industry. Under the microscope were the mines, which were the main source of the world’s crocidolite (blue) fiber; their owners (mainly multinationals, such as Cape Asbestos); and their impoverished communities of black and colored workers. The book is a masterpiece of careful exposition and research, which weaves together archive material, interviews, and a deep knowledge of the South African milieu. To see the mines firsthand and interview mine owners and former workers, Jock visited dangerous places. In the late 1990s, he toured several mines in the Northern Cape, where the landscape was littered with tailing dumps of fiber from abandoned workings (and where even today asbestos contaminates the environment). Asbestos Blues is a darker book than his Australian study. The asbestos cancer mesothelioma hovers menacingly over events. In 2 striking chapters toward the end of the book, Jock related how the asbestos companies first commissioned research into mesothelioma and then in the early 1960s suppressed the findings. Despite the understated text, the author’s dismay at the connivance of physicians, such as Cape Asbestos’s medical officer Dr. Walter Smither, is evident. Asbestos Blues, though, was published against a more uplifting backdrop: the successful legal fight against Cape Asbestos by the Community of Prieska against Asbestos, to which the book and their associated documents made an important contribution. Gregarious and down-to-earth, Jock was the opposite of the cloistered academic. He loved traveling, particularly to his favorite research destination—South Africa. He was a regular participant at academic and activists’ conferences and provided direct help to numerous asbestos victims’ groups. He was an occasional expert witness in litigation, but his overriding interest as an academic was in the documents (or “docs,” as he termed them fondly). After receiving one particularly rich treasure trove, he wrote of the “fun of simply sifting through the docs. I love documents” (e-mail to G. Tweedale, March 27, 2003). He developed an insatiable appetite for collecting and reading documentary material, which he assembled into a huge personal archive. In 2000 at an activists’ conference in Brazil, Jock met Geoffrey Tweedale (who had published a study of U.K. asbestos giant Turner & Newall). They agreed that what was needed was a global study of the asbestos disaster. Both had been struck by fresh statistics, which showed that most of the world’s asbestos had been mined after 1960. How was this possible after the discovery of mesothelioma, even in persons with only environmental exposure? A jointly authored book set out to answer this question by exploring the sophisticated (and often hidden) ways in which the asbestos industry had mounted a powerful rear-guard action. 4 International Journal of Health Services 0(0) The resulting monograph, Defending the Indefensible, was well primed with “docs.”5 The authors were able to combine their own documentary resources, such as the vast Turner & Newall archive and Cape Asbestos’s South African documents. The project also benefited from access to David Egilman’s equally vast digital archive (which was supplemented by timely donations from Barry Castleman and Albert Donnay). Jock was granted access to the Irving Selikoff papers at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City, which had an important impact on the study (the book would be dedicated to Selikoff’s memory). Besides informing the text, the documents enabled the authors to counter the smears and distortions surrounding Selikoff, which had been partly generated by historians working for asbestos industry attorneys. The coauthors were poles apart geographically during the writing and research, which necessitated endless e-mails. Geoffrey Tweedale learned to know exactly what time it was in Melbourne if he wanted to elicit a quick response; he also learned to accept with good grace the invariable news that the English cricket team was being whitewashed by the Australians (Jock loved cricket, and Australian rules football, almost as fervently as documents). In 2008, Defending the Indefensible was awarded the Wadsworth Prize by the Business Archives Council in the United Kingdom. Jock’s perspectives on the history of occupational diseases in mining had broadened to include silicosis (and its concomitant tuberculosis). This interest partly stemmed from a fascination with the work experience of American miners and tunnel drillers but mainly from his investigation of gold mining in South Africa. The research terrain was similar to asbestos, consisting of a document trail, the involvement of multinationals (this time Anglo-American), and a growing crisis of occupational disease that was soon to hit the courts. After the publication of several articles, Jock completed another book on South Africa’s gold mines and the politics of silicosis.6 He revealed how that industry, in collusion with a minority state, hid a pandemic of silicosis for most of the 20th century. Meanwhile, workers with tuberculosis were allowed to spread the potentially fatal disease to rural communities in South Africa and to laborsupplying states. By 2000, this had resulted in a disease rate among black migrant miners that was a hundred times higher than officially acknowledged. Jock was appointed emeritus professor on his retirement and acquired a home at Flinders Island, where he intended to continue writing. In April 2017, however, he received the devastating diagnosis that he had mesothelioma. His reaction was to hit his exercise bike and the “docs” with renewed energy in an attempt to complete the draft of a follow-up book on South African gold mining. This was intended to extend his exposé of the collusion between the industry, the South African state, and the British Colonial Office in buying and selling labor. Jock believed that this collusion spread tuberculosis throughout southern Africa. With the help of his partner, Pavla Miller, he succeeded in finishing his draft manuscript but sadly did not live to start other planned Tweedale and Castleman 5 projects. Characteristically, though, he had passed a hoard of primary materials on silicosis and asbestosis in South Africa and Australia to his American friends David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz. The documents, as part of “Project Toxicdocs” at Columbia University and City University of New York, will ensure that his legacy in research and advocacy endures. Jock believed that his fatal exposure to asbestos (predominant cause of mesothelioma) almost certainly occurred while researching Asbestos Blues in South Africa about 20 years before his diagnosis. Like heroic firefighters who risk their lives while attempting to rescue others, Jock had sacrificed his own life when he visited the dusty mining townships in search of the truth about asbestos. It was a bitter and cruel irony that he died trying to save others from being exposed to the same lethal asbestos fibers that tragically claimed his own life. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. References 1. McCulloch J. The Politics of Agent Orange: The Australian Experience. Richmond, Australia: Heinemann; 1984. 2. McCulloch J. Asbestos: Its Human Costs. St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press; 1986. 3. International Ban Asbestos Secretariat Website. http://ibasecretariat.org/lka-in-me mory-of-jock-mcculloc.php. Published January 21, 2018. Accessed May 5, 2018. 4. McCulloch J. Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians and the State in South Africa. Oxford, England: James Currey; 2002. 5. McCulloch J, Tweedale G. Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and Its Fight for Survival. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; 2008. 6. McCulloch J. South Africa’s Gold Mines and the Politics of Silicosis. Woodbridge, Suffolk/Johannesburg, South Africa: James Curry/Boydell & Brewer Ltd; 2012. Author Biographies Geoffrey Tweedale received his PhD (Economics) from the London School of Economics in 1983. He was formerly a professor of business history at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School in the UK. He has a long-standing interest in the history of occupational health and has published on asbestos-related diseases, byssinosis, silicosis, and cancers in the cotton and chemical industries. He wrote the first study of a British asbestos company: 6 International Journal of Health Services 0(0) Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (2001). A follow-up volume, Defending the Indefensible (2008), was written with Jock McCulloch. Barry Castleman is an Environmental Consultant trained in chemical and environmental engineering. He holds a Doctor of Science degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He has been a consultant to numerous agencies of the US government and other governments, international bodies, and environmental groups dealing with public health issues. He has spent the past 40 years working on asbestos as a public health problem and has testified as an expert in civil litigation in the US on the history of the asbestos hazard. His Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (2005) is in its fifth edition.