History

The notion that smoking tobacco is injurious to the body is not of recent origin. King James I of England, in his classic "Counterblaste to Tobacco," written in 1604, outlined a number of beliefs about tobacco's ill effects on health and urged his subjects to avoid it. He called smoking a "filthie noveltie… A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs…." Opinions on the possible benefits and health damage caused by use of tobacco varied over the next 300 years. Some nineteenth-century arguments that tobacco use injured health were linked to moral arguments against its use rather than to what today would be considered medical evidence.

In 1926 Sir Humphrey Rolleston of Cambridge University (the same ROLLESTON who headed the committee on the use of opioids) addressed the Harrogate Medical Society on the subject of medical...