A question sort of related to my research! I study occupational health history with a particular focus on the stone industry, and therefore spend a lot of time tracking down mentions of silicosis in historic trade journals. Up until the 1920s silicosis references are most often found under a variety of terms such as “consumption,” “stone consumption,” “pneumoconoiosis,” or “phthisis.” The terms, as you found, are used interchangeably, often with multiple versions present within a single article. One of the reasons for this is that the causes of and differences between various lung diseases were not clearly understood and diagnosis was dependent on the existing diagnostic methods of the time period. Prior to the development of x-rays and then medical microbiology in the late 1800s-early 1900s doctors could only try to distinguish between lung diseases through patient observation (Rosental 30). Even with new medical technologies it took a long time and much debate to come up with the standardized diagnoses that we have today. One of the primary influences in this area, at least in the occupational sector, was the work of insurance companies in the 1920s and beyond to develop methods to determine what needed to be compensated as work-related and what could be excluded.

References:

Rosental, Paul-André. Silicosis: A World History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Sellers, Christopher C. Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Melling, Joseph. “Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt? Experts, Lay Knowledge, and the Role of Radiography in the Diagnosis of Silicosis in Britain, c. 1919-1945.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 84, no. 3 (2010): 424–66.