Exposure by occupation
What does your work put into your body?
In 1700 Bernardino Ramazzini proposed adding one question to the medical history: what is your occupation? It stayed in clinical practice for two centuries, then quietly disappeared.
Exposure by occupation
In 1700 Bernardino Ramazzini proposed adding one question to the medical history: what is your occupation? It stayed in clinical practice for two centuries, then quietly disappeared.
Illustrative only, and not a diagnosis — actual exposure depends on the workplace, the hours, the duration and the protective measures in place. Colours mark the five recognised classes of occupational hazard.
Why this matters
Occupational medicine is where medicine learned what exposure does to a body. Chimney sweeps and soot. Radium dial painters. Asbestos. Cotton dust. In each case a group received a concentrated dose, became ill early and visibly, and in doing so revealed what a diluted dose does to everyone else across forty years.
That is the logic underneath this page. The person doing the job gets the strong version of an exposure that a great many other people are getting weakly — and because their version appears sooner and more clearly, it can be studied.
Which is also why the exposure history belongs in an ordinary medical record, and not only in an industrial one.
Tell me what you do, and how long you have been doing it.
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Message me on WhatsApp with what's been happening and how long it's been going on. Writing on behalf of an organisation? Send your sector, headcount and sites.