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Where can you find a) a Mayo Clinic cigarette case, b) a “Dear Doctor” letter from a tobacco company, and c) scores of original smoking-related political cartoons?
The answer: At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, on the historic campus of soon-to-be-closed Walter Reed Army Hospital.
The exhibit consists of the best of more than 300 original cartoons acquired over a 35-year period by Dr. Alan Blum, professor of family medicine at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
He has campaigned against the tobacco industry since his days as a high school newspaper editor. “By the 1990s, I was plumb tuckered out. … I had lost my sense of humor.
“I started looking over all these cartoons that I had saved from the newspapers. And they made me laugh. And so I started writing one by one to each of the cartoonists, asking if I could acquire the originals.”
The display, which features the work of more than 50 nationally known cartoonists, is not without its share of controversy, Dr. Blum said. Several artifacts in the exhibit typify the medical profession's well-documented collusion with the tobacco industry. The American Medical Association for years held stock in R.J. Reynolds Corp. and Philip Morris USA, he noted.
“Not only did the tobacco companies sponsor exhibits and give away cartons of cigarettes at medical meetings until the 1980s, but for decades, beginning in the 1940s, the leadership of organized medicine was in cahoots with the tobacco industry,” he added.
Although “the story … is not full of a great many heroes,” he cited the former surgeon general Dr. C. Everett Koop as an exception, along with Nixon's surgeon general, Dr. Jesse L. Steinfeld, who issued the Nonsmokers' Bill of Rights against the advice of Elliot L. Richardson, former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The earliest reports of smoking's deleterious effects came from German researchers around the time of World War I. By 1928, the first epidemiologic report linking smoking and cancer was published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Herbert L. Lombard and Dr. Carl B. Doering. A decade later, Dr. Alton Ochsner and Dr. Michael DeBakey published a review of 400 articles on the subject, Dr. Blum said.
Yet despite the mounting evidence on smoking's health risks, physicians were complacent about acting on the science. “Doctors were laughing” at the notion that smoking could be harmful, Dr. Blum noted. “Two-thirds of physicians—like my father—smoked cigarettes.”
Dr. Blum's exhibit, which is scheduled to run through March 31, 2007, is intended to give the public the last laugh. For more information, call 202-782-2200 or go online to www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum
Where can you find a) a Mayo Clinic cigarette case, b) a “Dear Doctor” letter from a tobacco company, and c) scores of original smoking-related political cartoons?
The answer: At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, on the historic campus of soon-to-be-closed Walter Reed Army Hospital.
The exhibit consists of the best of more than 300 original cartoons acquired over a 35-year period by Dr. Alan Blum, professor of family medicine at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
He has campaigned against the tobacco industry since his days as a high school newspaper editor. “By the 1990s, I was plumb tuckered out. … I had lost my sense of humor.
“I started looking over all these cartoons that I had saved from the newspapers. And they made me laugh. And so I started writing one by one to each of the cartoonists, asking if I could acquire the originals.”
The display, which features the work of more than 50 nationally known cartoonists, is not without its share of controversy, Dr. Blum said. Several artifacts in the exhibit typify the medical profession's well-documented collusion with the tobacco industry. The American Medical Association for years held stock in R.J. Reynolds Corp. and Philip Morris USA, he noted.
“Not only did the tobacco companies sponsor exhibits and give away cartons of cigarettes at medical meetings until the 1980s, but for decades, beginning in the 1940s, the leadership of organized medicine was in cahoots with the tobacco industry,” he added.
Although “the story … is not full of a great many heroes,” he cited the former surgeon general Dr. C. Everett Koop as an exception, along with Nixon's surgeon general, Dr. Jesse L. Steinfeld, who issued the Nonsmokers' Bill of Rights against the advice of Elliot L. Richardson, former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The earliest reports of smoking's deleterious effects came from German researchers around the time of World War I. By 1928, the first epidemiologic report linking smoking and cancer was published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Herbert L. Lombard and Dr. Carl B. Doering. A decade later, Dr. Alton Ochsner and Dr. Michael DeBakey published a review of 400 articles on the subject, Dr. Blum said.
Yet despite the mounting evidence on smoking's health risks, physicians were complacent about acting on the science. “Doctors were laughing” at the notion that smoking could be harmful, Dr. Blum noted. “Two-thirds of physicians—like my father—smoked cigarettes.”
Dr. Blum's exhibit, which is scheduled to run through March 31, 2007, is intended to give the public the last laugh. For more information, call 202-782-2200 or go online to www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum
Where can you find a) a Mayo Clinic cigarette case, b) a “Dear Doctor” letter from a tobacco company, and c) scores of original smoking-related political cartoons?
The answer: At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, on the historic campus of soon-to-be-closed Walter Reed Army Hospital.
The exhibit consists of the best of more than 300 original cartoons acquired over a 35-year period by Dr. Alan Blum, professor of family medicine at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
He has campaigned against the tobacco industry since his days as a high school newspaper editor. “By the 1990s, I was plumb tuckered out. … I had lost my sense of humor.
“I started looking over all these cartoons that I had saved from the newspapers. And they made me laugh. And so I started writing one by one to each of the cartoonists, asking if I could acquire the originals.”
The display, which features the work of more than 50 nationally known cartoonists, is not without its share of controversy, Dr. Blum said. Several artifacts in the exhibit typify the medical profession's well-documented collusion with the tobacco industry. The American Medical Association for years held stock in R.J. Reynolds Corp. and Philip Morris USA, he noted.
“Not only did the tobacco companies sponsor exhibits and give away cartons of cigarettes at medical meetings until the 1980s, but for decades, beginning in the 1940s, the leadership of organized medicine was in cahoots with the tobacco industry,” he added.
Although “the story … is not full of a great many heroes,” he cited the former surgeon general Dr. C. Everett Koop as an exception, along with Nixon's surgeon general, Dr. Jesse L. Steinfeld, who issued the Nonsmokers' Bill of Rights against the advice of Elliot L. Richardson, former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
The earliest reports of smoking's deleterious effects came from German researchers around the time of World War I. By 1928, the first epidemiologic report linking smoking and cancer was published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Herbert L. Lombard and Dr. Carl B. Doering. A decade later, Dr. Alton Ochsner and Dr. Michael DeBakey published a review of 400 articles on the subject, Dr. Blum said.
Yet despite the mounting evidence on smoking's health risks, physicians were complacent about acting on the science. “Doctors were laughing” at the notion that smoking could be harmful, Dr. Blum noted. “Two-thirds of physicians—like my father—smoked cigarettes.”
Dr. Blum's exhibit, which is scheduled to run through March 31, 2007, is intended to give the public the last laugh. For more information, call 202-782-2200 or go online to www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum