My First Recognition of the Relationship of Smoking and Lung Cancer (1973)

This article was a personal historical account in a "Corner of History" section, not a research study, and it did not concern asbestos. The author, a surgeon in New Orleans, recalled seeing a lung cancer autopsy as a medical student and then no further case for seventeen years, until after coming to Tulane University as Professor of Surgery in 1927. The author then saw eight more cases in six months, and all of these patients had smoked cigarettes heavily. Noting that cigarette sales had risen during and after the First World War, the author proposed a link with a lag of about 20 years, while calling the evidence at the time very nebulous. The author described an analysis by Shimkin and co-workers comparing the author's surgical cases, mostly pneumonectomies, with Overholt's more conservative operations. Long-term survival in the two series was comparable. In blood tests at the author's institution, tumor cells were found in the peripheral arterial blood of no patient with non-neoplastic disease, but in 30% of those with proved malignant lung disease. The author stated that most bronchogenic cancers are caused by cigarette smoking and are preventable.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry.

We publish an editorial for research and commentary: it shows what the medical literature in a leading asbestos company's own library said on the subject, and when. Our summary above is our own reading of it. The copyright stays with the publisher.