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idea that rather than adding a disease at a time as we discovered it and knowing that we would never catch up with the whole process, we should have a general coverage of occupational diseases, leaving it to the Board to decide whether in a particular case the illness and disability, which the claimant claimed came from his work, did in fact come from his work and was a damage resulting in and out of his employment. If it did, we were to make the finding in that particular case. He was suffering from an illness.
We were a long time getting the law, but we weren't swamped with claims. There aren't such an awful lot of these cases. Industrial diseases are terrible when they occur, but they don't occur all the time. By this time a considerable body of knowledge was being built up in our state and throughout the country. Just about this time Alice Hamilton was taken on as the head of the Industrial Medicine Department of Harvard Medical. She, of course, had been an old-time factory inspector and associated with us in an advisory capacity. She continued to advise us about certain things. She was our best medical man to go to when we had a mysterious disease - when somebody claimed illness and we were not able to connect it. She had a very broad knowledge of this, probably the best in the country as shown by the fact that Harvard invited her to head up this new
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