HEALTH

Smoking and Lung Cancer

1950 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

In 1950, Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill established the association between smoking and lung cancer, a disease that had been rare before the manufactured cigarette.

The study published in 1950 by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill establishes the association between smoking and lung cancer, a disease previously rare enough for practitioners to memorise individual cases and whose incidence had increased with the manufactured cigarette. The design employed, known as case-control, was then new: to each patient with lung cancer is matched a patient of the same age and sex hospitalised for another reason, and the histories of the two groups are compared. The British Doctors Study, a cohort followed for fifty years by the same authors, confirmed the result: among men born between 1900 and 1930, those who continued smoking died on average ten years earlier than non-smokers, and stopping before thirty removed almost all the excess risk. The tobacco industry organised in response a systematic contestation of the findings.

Why it matters

Tobacco is at the origin of about a hundred million deaths in the twentieth century, lung cancer alone still causing nearly 1.5 million a year. The demonstration founded risk epidemiology and the use of long-term prospective cohorts. The contestation strategy deployed by the industry has moreover served as a documented model for other sectors confronted with unfavourable scientific results.

Dating & uncertainty

The date retained is that of the 1950 study. The British Doctors cohort, exclusively male, was followed for fifty years. Ten years after the initial publication, only a third of American doctors surveyed considered the demonstration established.

Our species’ history as one day

23:59:3920.8 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day