The Smoke Nuisance

AS VIVIDLY ILLUSTRATED IN this 1886 wood engraving, the American campaign against cigarettes long antedated the rigorous mid-20th-century epidemiological demonstration of the association between smoking and specific pathological conditions, such as lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. This image, which suggests the mix of medical, sanitary, social, moral, and aesthetic objections to smoking current in this earlier period, appeared in Good Health,1 the health reform journal edited by John Harvey Kellogg from 1874 to 1943. Kellogg was just one of a small army of zealous reformers in the late 19th and early 20th century who combined moral and medical concerns in a campaign that marched from temperance to prohibition and equated the hygienic and social evils of “tobaccoism” with those of alcoholism. Their hope that cigarette prohibition would soon follow alcohol prohibition rose and crested in the 1920s, when women were first recruited to cigarette smoking in large numbers.2 Although physicians participated in the Progressive-era campaigns against smoking, by the 1920s most scientifically minded doctors had distanced themselves from what they were coming to regard as the annoying and embarrassing legacies of Victorian prudery and puritanism.3 Modern scientists and physicians insisted on firm evidence of smoking's harmful effects, and, perhaps lulled by the tobacco companies' heavy advertising in medical journals, they adopted the habit themselves in large numbers. In 1928, one writer complained that cigar and cigarette smoke was so thick at medical meetings that it was difficult to see the lantern slides.4 Some physicians even argued for the cigarette's pathophysiological innocence and psychological benefit. In October of the same year, an advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes in Collier's magazine claimed the cigarettes had the endorsement of “20,697 doctors.” Only the definitive epidemiological studies of Richard Doll, A. Bradford Hill, and others in the late 1940s and early 1950s would begin to turn the tide of medical and popular opinion. The Web site also provides information on ordering reproductions of images. If you have a print, photograph, or other visual item that might be appropriate for this collection, please contact the History of Medicine Division

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