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On 26 June 1954 the main article in the British Medical Journal was on the mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits.
It was the tipping point that established smoking as the major cause of lung cancer.
Written by Dr Richard Doll and Professor A Bradford Hill, it was the culmination of years of work by the Medical Research Council. Suspicion hardened into an evidence based conclusion.
It was the start of a struggle. Fifty years passed before smoke-free public places were achieved.
The chief medical officer of the day, Sir John Charles, “lamented the mysterious and inexorable rise in the number of deaths from cancer of the lung” but did nothing. Politicians gave press conferences on the risks of smoking. Enoch Powell believed that something that could be freely sold should be freely advertised. Sir George Godber, Charles’ successor, made the campaign a lifetime objective, and Smoking and Health, the landmark report of the Royal College of Physicians in 1962, owed much to his behind the scenes work.
- For a fuller account of the struggle, see www.nhshistory.net
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From NHS History Blog
Geoffrey Rivett is vice-chair of the governors of Homerton foundation trust and author of From Cradle to Grave: fifty years of the NHS.
Readers' comments (1)
Briar Tuck | 14-Aug-2009 9:51 am
"It was the tipping point that established smoking as the major cause of lung cancer."
Slipshod copy. It established nothing of the sort, other than Doll's rather questionable later career funded by brown envelopes from Monsanto.
"Suspicion hardened into an evidence based conclusion."
...which lacked only one thing, namely evidence.
"The chief medical officer of the day, Sir John Charles, “lamented the mysterious and inexorable rise in the number of deaths from cancer of the lung” but did nothing."
Presumably, being a man of some integrity, he recognised that tobacco use for the previous 400 years had not resulted in any "mysterious and inexorable rise in the number of deaths from cancer of the lung”. Fashion is fickle with facts, as indeed are you. Ablative materials used in automobile construction, industrial particle emissions, and above-ground nuclear testing are all, therefore, blameless.
And to think that whole generations of well-paid careers have been built on this nonsense, at public expense.
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