Silicosis is a disease associated with mining work, whose importance was first recognized in the medical, economic and legal fields in the 1930s. It has become an important object of historical study for both social and occupational medicine. Through the history of silicosis it has been possible to study the adoption of the concept of "occupational disease" and the birth of occupational medicine in Colombia. This process is analyzed in the article through a reading of medical publications from the first half of the twentieth century regarding silicosis in Colombian mining