Lorin E. Kerr

Who is Lorin E. Kerr?

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1909, Lorin Edgar Kerr was educated at the University of Toledo where he received his B.A. in 1931 and at the University of Michigan, receiving his M.D. in 1935 and a M.S.P.H. in1939. From 1937 to 1944 he served in municipal and county public health departments in Ohio and Michigan. Kerr joined the United States Public Health Service in 1944, first in the War Food Administration and later in the Industrial Hygiene Division. While with the Industrial Hygiene Division he provided consultant services for labor unions which were then beginning to develop their own medical care programs.

In October 1948 Kerr joined the newly formed Welfare and Retirement Fund of the United Mine Workers of America, simultaneously accepting an appointment as an area medical administrator in Morgantown, West Virginia. From 1951 to 1969 he served as assistant to the medical director of the Welfare and Retirement Fund. While with the fund Kerr developed the U.M.W.A. Department of Occupational Health, the first occupational medical program to be established by a major labor union. In 1969 he was appointed as the first director of the department, a position he held for years.

Kerr has been a leader in the field of occupational health for more than four decades and has had an important impact on legislation and on the medical and public health professions. Coal workers' pneumonoconiosis was one of Kerr's major concerns from the beginning of his employment by the UMWA and it became his primary responsibility after his appointment as director of the Department of Occupational Health. Along with Terence E. Carroll of the National Institute of Rehabilitation and Health Services, Kerr and his colleagues in the UMWA played a major role in gaining recognition of black lung as a disease entity and cause of disability. Their efforts led to passage of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which created a black lung compensation program for coal miners, and its amendment in 1972, that extended benefits to all miners with fifteen or more years of service who suffered respiratory impairment, whether pneumonoconiosis was pathologically verifiable or not. The recognition of, and compensation for, black lung disease helped to create a much broader definition of the relationship between occupation and disease.