Disability and Compensation

Introduction

¹ Department of Health Care and Epidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

We must, of course, recognize that every case of disability from lung disease of occupational origin represents a failure of the preventive strategy or of procedures that should have been in place. Most often at the present time we are dealing with clinical cases that have arisen because 20 or 30 years ago, the necessity of very careful control of the working environment was not realized.

The standards which society should apply to itself were enunciated pretty clearly by Samuel Johnson in 1760, well before the start of the Industrial Revolution. He wrote, "No man has a right to any good without partaking of the evil by which that good is necessarily produced; no man has a right to security by another's danger, nor to plenty by another's labour, but as he gives something of his own which he who meets the danger or undergoes the labour considers as equivalent." These ideals will prove hard for us to live up to more than 200 years later.