Sick and tired

When the link between tobacco and lung cancer was first established in the early 1950s, one obvious question arose: should doctors tell people not to smoke? These days, of course, the answer seems equally obvious — but at the time, medical opinion was divided. According to the highly distinguished Dr Erich Geiringer in a letter to the Lancet, ‘the best advice a doctor can give …to many non-smokers’ was that ‘they should get a pipe and dissolve their …body-destroying frustrations into blue smoke’. Less radically, Sidney Russ, a London University professor, pointed out that if doctors started nagging their patients about smoking, then logically they might as well nag them about eating bacon and egg for breakfast because of heart disease, or about sunbathing because of skin cancer — and bossiness on that scale was clearly unthinkable.

For most of us, I suspect, medicine’s huge shift towards a more preventative approach over the past 60 years feels rather sensible.