Commentary: Lung cancer and tobacco consumption

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The issue of Zeitschuft für Krebsforschung in which Schairer and Schöniger's1 paper appeared did not reach Britain during the war (although most other issues did) and it is still not held by many libraries and was not indexed in the cumulative medical index. It is understandable, therefore, that it was not mentioned at the conference held by the Medical Research Council in 1947 to discuss the reasons for the increase in mortality attributed to lung cancer (Hill, personal communication) and was not referred to when Hill and I published our first paper on the association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer,2 although we did refer to Müller's paper that had been published in 1939.3 Schairer and Schöniger's paper came to the attention of British research workers sometime in the next 2 years and was listed as one among several papers that had previously reported an association between smoking and lung cancer in the final report of our case-control study4 and it was subsequently noted regularly in reviews of the subject on both sides of the Atlantic. In Germany it received a mixed reception. It was mentioned by Bauer5 in his textbook on cancer (though its conclusions were not endorsed) and was accepted in East Germany by Lickint6 who had long been convinced of the hazards of smoking. In West Germany, however, interest in the effects of smoking waned, as a reaction to the anti-smoking policies of the Nazi government, and it came to be ignored. It has consequently never been properly reviewed and its conclusions not emphasized until Davey Smith, Ströbele and Egger drew attention to it 50 years later in an article on Nazi medicine in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 1994.7

This publication has 10 references indexed in Scilit: