Rationale for Industrial Hygiene Practice
Authors: Harris Robert L. , Cralley Lewis J. , Cralley Lester V. 
Published: August 2005

The professional field of industrial hygiene has its roots in the profession of public health.Webster'sdictionary definespublic healthas “the art and science dealing with the protection and improvement of community health by organized community effort and including preventive medicine and sanitary and social science.” The termpublic healthwas first used early in the seventeenth century. The termindustrial hygieneto identify a profession or field of work is probably of twentieth century origin. One must go further back in history, however, to find the origin of its words. The term “industry,” with a dictionary meaning, “systematic labor for some useful purpose or the creation of something of value,” has its English origin in the fifteenth century. The word “hygiene” goes back to much earlier times. Hygieia, a daughter of Aesklepios who is god of medicine in Greek mythology, was responsible for the preservation of health and prevention of disease. Thus, the roots of the termindustrial hygienemeanpreservation of health and prevention of disease among people engaged in systematic labor for some useful purpose or the creation of something of value. In the public health context, then, the purpose of industrial hygiene is to protect the health of communities of workers. The modern definition of industrial hygiene includes protection of the health of persons living around a place of work from hazards that may arise from that place of work.

That working in mines and other workplaces caused diseases and death among workers has been known for more than two thousand years. The association between work and disease was recognized, but knowledge on the toxicity of materials, the hazards of physical and biologic agents, and of ergonomic stressors encountered in industry, did not exist in those very early times. With few exceptions, then, the earliest attention given to worker health was in applying the knowledge at hand, which was primarily the recognition and treatment of illnesses associated with a job.

Thus, although diseases caused by conditions of work have been recognized and treated for many hundreds of years, it was not until around the turn of the twentieth century that major effort begin to be directed toward what we now think of as fundamental industrial hygiene—the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of workplace environmental health stresses in the prevention of occupational diseases.

The aim of this chapter is not to document or present chronologically the major past contributors to worker health and their relevant works, or the events and episodes that gave urgency to the development of industrial hygiene as a science and a profession. Rather, the purpose of the chapter is to place in perspective the many factors involved in relating environmental stresses to health and the rationale upon which the practice of industrial hygiene is based, including the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of workplace stresses, the biological responses to these stresses, the body defense mechanisms involved, and their interrelationships.