1929

Fritz Lickint publishes statistical evidence linking lung cancer and cigarettes; his monumental Tabak und Organismus, published in 1939 in collaboration with Reich Committee for the Struggle against Addictive Drugs and the German Antitobacco League, “arguably the most comprehensive scholarly indictment of tobacco ever published” (Proctor, 183-186; 227). Franz Müller’s (Cologne) 1939 paper, a survey-based retrospective case-control study (“an exquisite piece of scholarship” [194]), concluded that rise in tobacco use in Germany was “the single most important cause of the rising incidence of lung cancer” in recent decades. This claim was “stronger even than any of the claims made by British or American scientists until the 1960s” (196). In 1938, legal sanctions against cigarettes began (203ff.). Publication of Schairer and Schöniger’s 1943 paper was the most convincing early demonstration of role of smoking in lung cancer; it “provided the most conclusive epidemiological evidence up to that time, anywhere in the world, that smoking posed a major lung cancer hazard” (213-17).