Finding Black Lung in the Archives

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This post was co-authored by Heather Green and Kaley MacMullin

Dusty, dirty, dark, and damp. These terms describe the conditions underground coal miners worked in for centuries. Danger is another term to characterize this work. Coal miners, more than other professions, knew that each day going underground was a matter of life or death. Explosions, cave-ins, and other disasters threatened the daily lives of the boys and men who worked at coal mines. These traumatic, and often dramatic, events captured the attention of local and national newspapers, as well as the attention of historians decades or centuries later. Disasters are one of the most studied workplace health and safety risks within the mining industry, but these bigger events were equally matched with a more quiet and less visible threat: dust.

A natural byproduct of the coal extraction process, dust steadily filled the air within underground settings. As miners axed, drilled, blasted, and crushed ore they worked enshrouded in it. Miners breathed fine coal dust into their lungs consistently throughout the workday. Some noticed this sooner than others, with coughing or dry throats, where others lived with dust-filled lungs for years before any warning showed. This steady exposure to dust in a subsurface workplace setting – combined with an absence of health measures in mines – created the perfect storm to nurture the most prevalent occupational illness amongst underground coal miners worldwide: coal worker’s pneumoconiosis (CWP), better known as Black Lung.
Black Lung is a respiratory disorder caused by the exposure and inhalation of coal dust over several years. It marbles the lungs black and blue, causes chronic coughing fits, shortness of breath, and tightening of the chest. In its progressive stage, black lung causes scaring and damage to the lungs blocking oxygen flow to the blood stream and placing strain on vital organs. Black Lung is essentially a terminal illness. It is irreversible and creates permanent lung damage and pre-mature death.1

Black lung was extremely common among coal workers across Canadian and U.S. coal districts, Nova Scotia, Alberta, British Columbia, and the Appalachians from the late 19th century until the 1970s when better ventilation and dust control, medical intervention, and labour union action led to a decline. From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, black lung was labelled a “vanishing disease” and its occurrence among mine workers dropped. However, since the 2000s, black lung in Central Appalachia had made a frightening re-emergence, targeting younger miners with fewer years underground and the disease is progressing faster then it had before.2

HG: While there is some historical scholarship on the disease in the U.S., there is minimal historical scholarship on black lung in the Canadian context. This is somewhat surprising given its prevalence in the zeitgeist of coal communities’ history. When I began researching the history of black lung in Nova Scotia as part of the Mining Dangers Project, I expected I’d find labour records, medical documentation, and newspaper coverage on black lung in the province. Growing up in Cape Breton, black lung was commonly known part of island history. In fact, there were retired miners in my own community who either suffered from the illness or knew people who did. However, I spent the first year of this project searching through the Nova Scotia Archives, Library and Archives Canada online catalogue, and the Museum of Industry files and came up empty.

Frustrated, perplexed, and somewhat hopeless, I ended my first year of archival work asking myself, “How is it possible that one of the most prevalent illnesses among underground coal miners since the 16th century (18th in Canada) is absent from the archives in a coal province?” It didn’t make sense to me – until I decided to temporarily pause that research for the spring season and switch my focus to accidents and injuries (other “slow disasters” often overlooked in the mining history literature) in Alberta coal mines.

After spending three weeks in the Provincial Archives of Alberta, I came away with thousands of photographed files about workplace accidents, injuries, and deaths, and mine rescue – but even in Alberta’s provincial archives, black lung was absent in all but one reference to a file the PAA did not have. With good fortune, though, Liza Piper previously mentioned coming across a file on black lung in the Canmore Museum Archives. It was the same file referenced in the PAA. With a spark of hope reigniting, I drove down to Canmore and hit the jackpot – fourteen files on black lung (files, not folders). It was in reading through these files that the archival absence began to make sense.

The files from the Canmore Archive were all related to Eileen Patterson, a journalist and activist who advocated for black lung recognition as a real occupational illness and its inclusion under workplace compensation. Patterson moved to Canmore, Alberta from Winnipeg in 1974 and worked as a journalist for the Canmore Miner newspaper and later served on Canmore’s town council. Patterson pursued a social work degree at the University of Calgary which included a practicum component where she worked with coal miners in Canmore and it was here that she began to learn of the widespread respiratory illness the majority of miners in the town suffered from along with their struggle qualifying for workers’ compensation. Patterson began researching black lung and following her practicum, District 18 of the United Mine Workers of American hired her to work on this cause.3

Eileen Patterson fonds, Canmore Museum Archives. Photo by H. Green.
Eileen Patterson

Patterson’s reports and correspondence were revealing about why black lung has remained silent among Canadian environmental and labour history. She strongly believed that the medical profession held a “strong prejudice against coal miners.” Throughout the 1970s, coal workers conflicted with management over the mitigation of coal dust and health and safety measures in the mines. Medical staff – often company doctors – ignored the ubiquity of black lung, often misdiagnosing it as asthma or bronchitis, or blaming miners for making themselves sick from cigarette smoking habits (even those who did not smoke were told second-hand smoke could impact the lungs).4

Patterson travelled to West Virginia to meet with Dr. Donald Rasmussen, the leading researcher on black lung in North America and a lifelong advocate for coal workers health. Rasmussen was one of the first medical professionals to provide testing and support for those inflicted at a time when most of the medical community refused to acknowledge it as legitimate. Patterson’s letters show a deep admiration for his dedication to the black lung movement. Shortly after her visit, she arranged testing for three miners at Rasmussen’s Black Lung Clinic.5

Though Patterson’s work was specific to Canmore and the Alberta coal industry, it is reasonable to speculate that coal districts elsewhere in Canada experienced the same managerial and medical dismissiveness. Within the files of correspondence were letters back and forth with District 26 of the UMWA and Glace Bay area union leaders and MLAs expressing the same obstacles and frustrations on that side of the country.6

Volume 5 no. 43 of The Forge, a Workers Communist Party newspaper, published 12 December 1960 reported on DEVCO’s dismissiveness of black lung disease among Cape Breton coal miners.

Returning from my Edmonton and Canmore archive research, Kaley MacMullin, a recently graduated honours sociology student at Saint Mary’s University began working with me on coal mining research through a SSHRC Explore grant. I assigned Kaley the onerous task of picking up where I left off at the Nova Scotia Archives – this time with new search terms and ideas of where we might find black lung adjacent information.

KM: As Heather mentioned, we were optimistic upon my return to the archives. After searching through hundreds of files, folders, and fonds, black lung disease remained absent. I scanned through thousands of documents containing information related to local and national mining companies, labour laws, health and safety reports, correspondents between different physicians, meeting minutes between various mining societies, and first-hand accounts of mining disasters, yet there was not a primary source in site that specifically spoke of black lung disease.

While disappointment lingered as I crossed each folder off our list, the findings exhibited what different actors in society found to be of relevance in relation to coal mining during our period of study. Doctors were infatuated with researching respiratory and lung diseases and illnesses that accompanied the habit of chronic smoking – a habit in which over half of Canada’s population partook in by 1965.7 Additionally, physicians were further drawn to tuberculosis research. With these as doctors’ primary research agenda, black lung went ignored and coal miners who developed the disease become abysmally ill. Medically speaking, black lung was not of particular interest, allowing the disease to remain hidden in plain sight. Despite the disease being as deadly as mining disasters or daily injuries, its slower progressive stages of development and quiet or nonspecific symptoms – in comparison to other lung and respiratory diseases at the time – could offer an explanation as to why the disease id largely absent in archival collections.

Along with the NS Archives, I also tackled the Dalhousie Medical Archives. Throughout my four-mouth duration of researching this subject, it was this small archive I found the most useful. One fonds specifically, the Barabara Hinds fonds, was our biggest lead and greatest insight into the presence of black lung among Nova Scotia coal miners. It also illustrated how Black Lung Disease was documented and shared with the media around 1974. Hines was a journalist and a medical correspondent for the Halifax Herald before becoming a public relations expert and medical reporter for Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine. In speaking with archivists at the Dal Medical Archives, I learned that Hines was dedicated to reporting activity within her local community pertaining to occupational lung diseases and workers’ compensation, among other areas of occupational interest. Throughout this archival collection, information related to black lung was a focal point.8 In my research at the Dal Medical Archives, I finally found exceptionally useful sources for all three themes within our summer research project.

HG: What we have learned from these early stages of research is that provincial, or even federal, archives aren’t the right place to find the histories we are looking to understand when it comes to the slow disaster of black lung and occupational risk. I suspect that bridging local archives and community memory will provide greater opportunity to document coal miners’ embodied experiences of the illness and their struggle for its medical recognition. Moving forward with this research, the next steps will be consulting community archives or heritage centers where the local experiences of miners are often better captured in collective memory or community publications. At some point in the next year, I will conduct oral history interviews with retired Cape Breton coal miners with firsthand experience with, or witnessing, the struggle of black lung as a disease and in its recognition as an occupational disease.

Additionally, in both my own and Kaley’s research, it was fascinating to see parallels in gender participation in both provinces. In both Alberta and Nova Scotia, men suffered most seriously from black lung, but women played an important role in labour and health activism. We are both excited to continue with this work and uncover more of the hidden history of black lung in Canada’s underground coal mines.

References

[1] Aysha Bodenhamer, and Thomas E. Shriver, “Environmental Health Advocacy and Industry Obstruction: The Case of Black Lung Disease,” Rural Sociology 85, 3 (2020): 1361.
[2] “How Black Lung Came Roaring Back to Coal Country,” New York Times, 20 June 2025.
[3] Canmore Museum, “Eileen Patterson,” Canmore Stories that Matter Project (2023).
[4] Cape Breton Post, “Benefits from Legislation Doubtful,” 25 May 1976. Eileen Patterson to Peter Fairchild, Leader of the Opposition, 18 October 1977. Eileen Patterson Fonds, Canmore Museum Archive, 1999.500.008 A-J.
[5] Eileen Patterson Fonds, Canmore Museum Archives, 1999.500.008b.
[6] Jeremy Akerman, NDP MLA for Cape Breton East to Eileen Patterson, 8 December 1976. Eileen Patterson Fonds, Canmore Museum Archives, 1999.500.008 K-AO.
[7] University of Waterloo, “Historical trends in smoking prevalence,” Figure 1.1 Smoking Prevalence in Canada 1965-2020.
[8] Barbra Hines Fonds, Textual Records, Dalhousie Medical Achieves, MS-2-130, Box 4, Folders 10 and 11.
Feature Image: “Sign Laboratory Black Lung Studies” by U.S. National Archives is marked with CC0 1.0. Sign to Laboratory Where Black Lung Studies Are Underway with Supervision by Dr. Donald Rasmussen. Miners From the Area of the Appalachian Regional Hospital at Beckley, West Virginia, and Several Other States Arrive to Learn If They Have an Accumulation of Coal Dust Particles Filling Up Their Lungs Which Leads to a Progressive Shortness of Breath 06/1974. Photographer: Corn, Jack.

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Heather Green

Heather Green is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Saint Mary's University. She is interested in the intersections of environmental and Indigenous histories, histories of Indigenous and Settler Relations, and mining history, particularly in the Canadian North. You can connect with her on twitter @heathergreen21.

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