1960's Medicine and Health | Smoking and Cancer

The Government Examines Smoking.

While scientists and physicians were generally convinced of the link between cancer and cigarettes by the early 1960s, the government was not. Political pressure from congressmen representing states where tobacco was grown delayed a Public Health Service report on the subject. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy asked U.S. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry to resolve the matter. Terry appointed a committee of ten, including three cigarette smokers, one cigar smoker, and one pipe smoker to review the findings of others rather than conduct their own research. Over a period of nearly two years committee members pored over eight thousand articles in the National Medical Library in Bethesda, Maryland. During the course of the inquiry Terry, who smoked cigarettes when the study started, switched to a pipe.

The Results.

The report of the surgeon general was presented in the auditorium of the...