HEALTH

The Cigarette Century

1950 CE

History · Contemporary · Holocene · Meghalayan

Lung cancer was once so rare that doctors remembered individual cases; the machine-made cigarette changed that, and in 1950 Doll and Hill's study of London hospital patients pointed to the cause. Their fifty-year cohort of British doctors then delivered epidemiology's most famous numbers: those who kept smoking died about ten years earlier than lifelong non-smokers, and stopping at thirty erased almost all the excess risk. The industry answered with an orchestrated campaign of doubt: ten years on, only one American doctor in three accepted that the case against cigarettes had been made.

Why it matters

The cigarette has been called the deadliest artefact in human history: on the order of a hundred million deaths in the twentieth century, with lung cancer alone still killing about 1.5 million people a year. The discovery of its harms founded modern risk epidemiology and the long cohort study; the tobacco companies' response wrote the playbook of scientific denial that other industries later borrowed. One consumer product, one method to convict it, one template for fighting back.

Dating & uncertainty

The anchor is the 1950 study by Doll and Hill linking smoking to lung cancer, a link their fifty-year cohort of male British doctors then confirmed: men born between 1900 and 1930 who kept smoking died about ten years younger than lifelong non-smokers, and stopping by thirty gained back nearly all of that. Lung cancer had been a rarity before mechanised cigarette manufacture; the industry's organised denial of the evidence lasted decades.

Sources

1. Doll & Hill (1950), British Medical Journal · Smoking and carcinoma of the lung: preliminary report
2. Doll et al. (2004), BMJ · Mortality in relation to smoking: 50 years' observations on male British doctorsdoi:10.1136/bmj.38142.554479.AE
3. Proctor (2012), Tobacco Control · The history of the discovery of the cigarette-lung cancer link: evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global tolldoi:10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2011-050338

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