Sick Days

Michelle Murphy. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. x + 253 pp. $21.95. .

Reviewed by Jody Roberts

What if you went to work and found yourself at day’s end inexplicably sick, suffering from what appeared to be a severe allergic reaction? Worse, what if you discovered that your illness could not be traced back to a single, easily avoidable trigger, but resulted instead from your environment—the paint on the walls, the carpet on the floor, the fabric of your chair, and the air circulating through your office’s ventilation system. You’ve realized that you’re allergic to everyday life in contemporary society; you are suffering from sick building syndrome.

In Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, Michelle Murphy deftly navigates a course that winds through the emergence and evolution of this mysterious illness, using the journey as an opportunity to highlight and expand our understanding of environmental justice and the politics of uncertainty in a synthetic world.

In early industrial workspaces humans occupied positions secondary to their artifactual coworkers—machines. In designing office spaces engineers faced the challenge of maximizing the functional performance of the human machine. Architectural design for offices set out to construct spaces that would optimize the comfort of workers, maximize their production and reliability, and ensure that they could be properly managed. But all was not well in the artificial environments of the office building. Beginning in the 1970s, new and inexplicable illnesses affecting many (mostly female) workers arose. While the exact source of the illnesses remained elusive, these women workers found themselves embroiled in a debate pitting traditional toxicology against popular epidemiology. As researchers in various fields searched for clues to these mysterious illnesses, the women mobilized to understand their inexplicable afflictions.

Woman workers created health surveys to raise the profile of these new ailments. The use of environmental health surveys placed the workers and their concerns at the intersection of debates about how to monitor, classify, and rectify the health issue. The surveys were highly effective at gathering data from groups of individuals, but lacked authority in scientific or legal arenas. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found the surveys insufficient for determining whether the women suffered from work-induced stress or were responding to exposure to chemical irritants (was the illness physical or psychological?). However, traditional toxicological studies that sought to associate specific illnesses with specific causes failed to address the complexity and uncertainty of these illnesses and could not identify a specific physical cause against which the EPA could act. When workers in the EPA headquarters itself became inexplicably ill, the debate over sick building syndrome came into the offices of those charged with objectively researching it.

Office designers of the early 20th century viewed buildings as machines and failed to take into consideration one very important element: the living organisms within the building. One tactic taken by scientists, engineers, and health professionals to overcome sick building syndrome was to reconceptualize the building as an ecological system. The emphasis in building design shifted from productivity and efficiency to health and living environment.

But while working environments changed to address this issue, people suffering from sick building syndrome were finding it difficult to create a “safe” space to live at home as well as at work. Some found help and support in online and physical communities; others sought lives seemingly free of synthetic products or equipped themselves with defense technologies, such as gas masks, air filters, and water filters. In the end many of these people have been left to experiment continuously with their bodies in this world, uncovering what makes them feel sick and what makes them feel safe.

Until now most authors have focused on places and people in extreme or unusual circumstances, looking at environmental justice issues at work in Louisiana’s “Chemical Corridor,” for instance. In Sick Building Syndrome, Murphy shifts the focus from the single isolated event to the mundane, the ordinary, and the everyday. Unlike other illnesses the syndrome could not be associated with a specific event or location. “Chemical dangers,” as Murphy puts it, “lurked nearby in the most unexpected places.” The chemicals to be avoided were not “hazardous” in the normal sense but were the “very materials and technologies of postwar comfort and success” in the seemingly innocuous products all around us (p. 3). Often issues of human health and environment are dealt with separately, as if humans live in a place untainted by the elements that affect our environment. Through examination of the emergence of sick building syndrome and multiple chemical sensitivities, Murphy emphasizes the inextricable link between the health of our bodies and the places in which we live and work.