Cigarette Century
by John Meyer
Abstract: US soldiers became addicted to the free cigarettes shipped to the front during World War I,
thus the market for cigarettes increased 633% from 1910 to 1919. Lung cancer was a rare disease until
cigarettes became popular.
A) The patient at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, in 1919, might have wondered during his last days why
all the physicians were so peculiarly interested in his case. When the man died, Dr. George Dock,
chairman of the department of medicine, asked all third- and fourth-year medical students at the
teaching hospital to observe the autopsy. The patient's disease had been so rare, he said, that most of
them would never see it again. The disease was lung cancer.
B) Dr. Alton Ochsner, then one of the students, wrote years later, "I did not see another case until
1936, seventeen years later, when in a period of six months, I saw nine patients with cancer of the lung.
Having been impressed with the extreme rarity of this condition seventeen years previously, this
represented an epidemic for which there had to be a cause. All the afflicted patients were men who
smoked heavily and had smoked since World War I. I had the temerity, at that time, to postulate that
the probable cause of this new epidemic was cigarette use."
C) At the beginning of this century, most smokers chose cigars; the cigarette was seen as somewhat
effete and faintly subversive. Smoking was an almost wholly male custom. In 1904 a New York City
policeman arrested a woman for smoking a cigarette in an automobile and told her, "You can't do that
on Fifth Avenue" Smoking by female schoolteachers was considered grounds for dismissal. At an
official White House dinner in 1910, Baroness Rosen, wife of the Russian ambassador, asked
President Taft for a cigarette. The embarrassed President had to send his military aide, Maj. Archie
Butt, to find one; finally the bandleader obliged.
D) The commercial manufacture of cigarettes had been a cottage industry until 1881, when James A.
Bonsack invented a cigarette-making machine. In 1883 James Buchanan Duke, who had inherited his
father's tobacco business in Durham, North Carolina, bought two of Bonsack's machines. Within five
years Duke's company was selling nearly a billion cigarettes annually, far more than any other
manufacturer.
E) Until World War I, cigarette production in America remained stable. But after the United States
entered the conflict, in 1917, Duke's company and the National Cigarette Service Committee distributed
millions of cigarettes free to the troops in France, and they became so powerful a morale factor that
General Pershing himself demanded priority for their shipment to the front. The war began to fix the
cigarette habit on the American people: between 1910 and 1919 production increased by 633 percent,
from fewer than ten billion a year to nearly seventy billion. Contemporary literature reflected the
change. O. Henry's carefully observed turn-of-the-century stories almost never mention cigarettes, but
by the time of Ernest Hemingway's expatriates in The Sun Also Rises men and women alike smoke
constantly.
F) It was the consequences of this growing habit that physicians began to notice in the 1930s. As the
first cases of lung cancer began to appear, doctors struggled to find ways to cope with the disease.
Surgery was the only effective treatment for major internal cancers, but at the beginning of the century
no method existed to maintain a patient's respiration under anesthesia when the chest was opened, so
opening the chest almost always meant immediate death.
G) The problem began to yield in 1904, when two German surgical investigators pioneered the use of
enclosed chambers to maintain differential air pressure. One version enclosed the patient from the neck
down, together with the surgical team, in a chamber with lower than normal atmospheric pressure;
since the patient was breathing higher-pressure air from outside, his lung wouldn't collapse when his
chest was opened. The other researcher simplified the design by reversing it: his apparatus put the
patient's head in a pressurized chamber. The systems allowed the beginnings of modern chest surgery.
Before long the chambers were superseded by a tube passed into the windpipe.
Source: A Cigarette Century by Meyer, John - American Heritage Dec 1992 v43 n8 p72(9)
1) In one clear sentence, state the main idea of each paragraph in your own words.
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2) In one clear sentence, state the main idea of the entire seven paragraphs.
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