Manager: Stefano Gallo

Keywords: History Medicine History ILO International relations Italy

Abstract

The general objective of the project is to analyze the contribution that the International Labour Office (ILO) has made to the protection of health and safety at work, deepening the contribution made by Italian scientists and doctors in the international context. Therefore, the research foresees the identification of the documentary complexes concerning the work of Italian scholars to the progress of studies around the problems of occupational nature, with specific regard to the activity that the ILO has developed during the period between 1919 and 1999.

More specifically, the aim of the project is to explore the work of Luigi Carozzi and Luigi Parmeggiani on one hand, and on the other to reconstruct the web of relations between the ILO and other international organizations over the last eighty years – with special emphasis on the post-World War II period, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and European institutions (ECSC and EEC) with regard to occupational hygiene issues and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (AIRC) with regard to the study of occupational carcinogens.

Objectives

The first phase of the work consists in the identification, recognition, collection and arrangement of the historiographic sources on which to conduct the research. The reconnaissance will involve archives in Italy and abroad (such as the ILO Archives in Geneva) that preserve little-known and difficult to find documents that have remained unpublished until now, even though they are considered to have a high informative potential. In order to make these sources available to the single partners of the project, and in the future also to a wider scientific audience, the project foresees that the selected documents undergo a meticulous filing operation.

The second step of the project is the acquisition of digital copies of the fonds considered to be of greatest interest with the aim of starting the creation of a repository, whose actual realization at DBMS level is foreseen as well as the predisposition for an eventual publication on the web, while the actual publication with the identification of the destination site and of the appropriate web interface is beyond the scope of this work.