[The contributions of occupational medicine to ergonomics]

Major contributions to the development of ergonomics, originating from observations, studies, research and applications in numerous working situations in the occupational health area, are presented and discussed in an analytical and concise manner. Ergonomics can provide an extremely useful conceptual and methodological approach provided it complies with the trends developed by the European Coal and Steel Commission in the past ten years for the coal and steel industry and now adopted by the International Ergonomics Association. Otherwise prevention of occupational hazards would be reduced to early diagnosis only, relinquishing all prospects of primary prevention which, if correctly applied, can only be achieved via an anthropocentric design concept. Therefore new epistemological choices, new theories, methods and design procedures need to be widely implemented so that they can be correctly synthetized, in accordance with the centrality, the values and the aspirations of the human operator in complex systems.