Rather than raise legitimate scholarly questions we feel Philip Scranton offers instead an intemperate attack on Deceit and Denial and a personal attack on our professional standards and ethical behavior.
We are scholars who have studied the history of occupational and environmental health for over two decades and have received praise for our scholarly books in the fields of the history of medicine and public health. We have written and edited individually and together eleven books with prestigious academic presses including Princeton University Press, Cornell University Press, the University of California Press, Cambridge University Press and others. In addition we have written scores of scholarly articles, book reviews and review essays in the leading journals in the fields of history and public health and have won awards from the American Public Health Association, the University of Massachusetts and the City University of New York for our work. Furthermore, our books have been widely and very positively reviewed. Two of our books have been designated as “Outstanding Academic Books” by Choice. In addition, our academic positions attest to the fact that our colleagues in our field have found it to be of sound and high quality. One of us is a University Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York, the highest academic rank; the other, a former University Distinguished Professor at CUNY, is presently Professor of History and Public Health at Columbia University and Director of the Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. Unlike Professor Scranton, our work over the past two decades has been devoted to exploring the history of occupational and environmental disease, the topic at hand in the book he has attacked.
Professor Scranton offers as the basis of his expertise in the area of the history of occupational and environmental health his affiliations with Rutgers University, his association with the Hagley Museum and Library and the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, and his scholarship in the fields of the modern history of technology and science and the history of business and industry, primarily in the United States. His report also refers to his “expert testimony” as a witness for corporate defendants in a 2002 asbestos case (Scranton, p. 2). [7]
He alleges that we have “violated the AHA’s and NCPH’s guidelines in six specific areas: I. Integrity and Accuracy; II. Misrepresentation and Omission; III. Advocacy and Oversimplification; IV. Inadequate Documentation; V. Qualification and Interpretation; and VI. Professional Ethics.” (Scranton, p.3) These are noxious charges that demand our careful response. Therefore, we will post on the web three sets of documents for the scholarly community to evaluate: 1) his comments about our book, 2) our response, and 3) the primary documents we use as evidence (and references) in the two chapters of our book that he has attacked. This third posting will be done as soon as practically possible in order that the scholarly community can judge for itself whether we distort their content, as Scranton asserts. In the meantime, readers can consult an extensive collection of these documents at the following URLs:
http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/search/default.asp?stemming=Yes&cmd=start&request=&i=vinyl&search=GO
http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/dirtysecrets/vinyl/1.asp"
We believe even this collection will convince the reader that what we report in our book is accurate and well-documented.
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