The article investigates the thesis that the workers’ struggle in different historical periods of both pre-modern and modern society included the struggle for the right to illness – the right of workers to the recognition of their illness, and of the fact that that the cause of the illness may be found in the conditions of their work. Occupational medicine is a discipline historically shaped by those forces that have also transformed work itself, as well as public perception of health. We follow the development of the concept of occupational diseases and its materialization in occupational medicine in theory and practice through periods of various economic and social changes that contributed to its institutionalization and, later, deinstitutionalization. The question of health and illness thus turns out to be closely related to its class determination – it is a question of victories of the workers’ movement regarding the prevention of unhealthy working conditions and compensation for the damage caused. The task of occupational medicine is to determine and decide which aspects of work are harmful to health. As a specialized science of occupational diseases, it was historically formed and institutionalized as an independent discipline under the explicit influence of the dynamics of class struggle, as it intervenes right in its core – the relationship between the worker and the employer.
