How Cigarette moved from being a Medical Wonder to Being Linked to ...

We've all heard the ominous warning that "smoking causes cancer," but have you ever wondered how this dire connection was established? Let's take a journey back in time to explore the origins of this critical discovery. It was in 1964 when the President of the American Cancer Society first uttered those fateful words, but the journey to that moment was a complex one.

There was a report published in the same year titled Smoking and Health that explained how smoking caused lots of diseases and since then, there have been different labels on cigarettes and you must have seen a lot of them, depending on the country you live in. In the 50s, there were a lot of studies pointing to a link between smoking and cancer but how did we get to that conclusion?

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Tobacco has been used medicinally for thousands of year, dating back to when Columbus got to the Caribbean and saw people using its smoke as a disinfecting air freshener, and they also used the snuff to knock people out before surgery. In modern day Mexico, it was used as an anti-diarrhea, and a remedy for wounds. Tobacco leaves were also crushed, and used as creams for skin infection such as Eczema.

With its medicinal reputation, tobacco was touted as a cure for a wide array of ailments, including tumors. Figures like John Nicot were fervently intrigued by tobacco's potential, experimenting with it on various illnesses, including cancer.

It's essential to understand that during this era, scientific experimentation was limited, and scholars could espouse theories about plants without rigorous scientific validation. This led to works like Pliny the Elder's "Natural History," filled with botanical claims that might seem surprising today. Similarly, the "Pharmacopoea Leidensis" classified tobacco as a remedy for colds and lethargy, even though these claims lacked scientific substantiation at the time.

There were a lot of theories when it came to health at the time, some people believed the Humoral theory where the thery looked at balancing four bodily fluid which was blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile for good health. Other theories were the Miasma model, and so on, and trust that these theories caused for the misuse of tobacco and a lot of plants at the time. Some pharmacopoea even suggested blowing tobacco smoke in the ear of people with ear-aches that didn't have inflammation.

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The widespread use of tobacco raised concerns when the word "cancer" became more prominent. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, smoking gained popularity, but cancer cases were not yet surging. However, between 1920 and 1950, lung cancer deaths skyrocketed, increasing 15-fold in the UK and 9-fold in the US. Blame was placed on factors like car exhaust and factory work, as comprehensive pathological research methods were not standardized.

Scientist were able to begin nail smoking and cancer together in the 1920s to 80s when researchers did some case study such as that of 1980 titled "Cancer studies in Massachusetts. 2. Habits, characteristics and environment of individuals with and without cancer". To perform this study, they sent questionnaires to people who had cancers and people who didn't have cancer. At the end, they were able to see that people who had cancer had certain relationships such as tobacco smoking.

Scientist such as Angel Honorio Roffo dedicated his study to understanding the chemicals in cigarette that caused cancer at the cellular level. He was looking at Tar and not Nicotine as the cause of cancer in Cigarette and decided to distill tobacco smoke in liquids, and tried them on mice to check which induced cancer, and as he suspected, the Tarry ones did induce cancer, while the Nicotine ones didn't.

The journey to uncovering the link between smoking and cancer is a testament to the evolving landscape of medical knowledge. From tobacco's hailed medicinal origins to its damning association with cancer, this historical perspective serves as a stark reminder of the importance of scientific research and critical thinking in safeguarding public health. While science experiment was still in its infancy, a correlation between smoking and cancer has been for a while now, and even till date, modern studies and researches are complimenting the fact.

How Cigarette moved from being a Medical Wonder to Being Linked to Cancer

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