Medicine and Health

• Although physicians had raised concerns about the health hazards of smoking since the 1800s, from the 1920s to the 1940s the number of reports in medical journals implicating cigarette smoking as a cause of cancer (for example, Lombard and Doering New England Journal of Medicine 1928;198:481-7) and premature death (for example, Pearl in Science 1938;87:216-7) rose steadily. Cigarette makers shrugged off these findings by turning to the image of dedicated physicians, more than two-thirds of whom still smoked, to sell their product. In 1946, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company debuted an advertising campaign on radio and in newspapers and magazines for its flagship Camel cigarette brand with the slogan, “More Doctors Smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”
• Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, RJ Reynolds and other cigarette makers including Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard were exhibitors at national and state medical meetings, including the annual convention of the American Medical Association (AMA).
• Advertisements for cigarettes appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for two decades until 1954–four years after the landmark reports on smoking and lung cancer by Doll and Hill in England (British Medical Journal 1950;117:39-48) and Wynder and Graham in the United States (JAMA 1950;143:329-36) and fully 13 years after the comprehensive review of smoking and lung cancer by Ochsner and DeBakey (Archives of Surgery 1941;42:209-258). As recently as 1983, a cigarette advertisement by the American Tobacco Company with the slogan “Carlton is lowest” (in carcinogenic “tar”) appeared in a mass-circulation medical publication, Physician East.