Hiding a Pandemic: Dr G.W.H. Schepers and the Politics of Silicosis in South Africa

The gold miners of South Africa have been among the most heavily medicalised of any workforce. As a consequence, for much of the twentieth century, the Chamber of Mines and its members claimed that the mines were safe and miners were relatively free of dust-induced occupational disease. For decades that orthodoxy was repeated in the medical literature. It was also repeated by numerous Commissions of Enquiry. However, epidemiology published since 1990 has identified a pandemic of silicosis, which now threatens the industry. The reasons for the hitherto invisibility of that disease burden have less to do with the limits of medicine than with the political imperatives of the gold industry.