Volume 6, Number 2 · February 17, 1966
Cancer Country
By Aubrey Lewis
Smoking, Health, and Personality
by H.J. Eysenck
Basic Books, 166 pp., $4.95
When tobacco was first introduced into Europe and Asia, potentates saw harm in it and some enacted the death penalty for those of their subjects who persisted in smoking. But only a proportion of the culprits were in fact put to death for the widespread crime, and the potentates soon substituted taxes for excommunications and executions. After three hundred years the death penalty is still linked to smoking, though not now by due process of law, and taxes on tobacco are still levied by governments: neither the risk of a shortened life, nor expense, nor alternative pleasures have eliminated smoking, nor is it less profitable for the revenue. Why the habit should have spread so fast and so far, and proved so tenacious, is a matter for conjecture. Other problems which it offers have not been left to conjecture, but made the subject of very active research. These are the problems raised by the association of cigarette smoking with disease, or, more specifically, by the association of cigarette smoking with cancer of the lung. Two impressive reports, from the Royal College of Physicians in England and the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee in the United States, documented and reviewed the present state of knowledge about this threatening aspect of public health. Both reports concluded that cigarette smoking is an important cause of lung cancer, far outweighing all other factors.
Review, 3007 words
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