David Rosner is Distinguished Professor of History and Sociomedical Sciences, and Director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, Columbia University.Gerald Markowitz is Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.

Rosner and Markowitz have produced a carefully crafted history of the rise and fall of this occupational disease, focusing especially on the political forces behind changing disease definitions.... Deadly Dust comes as a fresh breeze into one of the more stuffy and too often ignored alleys of medical history. - The Journal of the American Medical Association ""A thought-provoking, densely referenced, uncompromising history.... Like all good history, it challenges our basic assumptions about how the world is ordered and offers both factual information and a conceptual framework for rethinking what we 'know.'"" - The New England Journal of Medicine ""If there is a paradigmatic tale of occupational health... Deadly Dust is it."" - Science ""Deadly Dust raises an important methodological problem that has long gone underarticulated in medical historical circles: how can social historians of medicine offer political or economic explanations for the scientific efforts of their professional subjects without losing a grip on the biological aspects of disease?"" - The Journal of the History of Medicine