Recommendations from our site
“This is a compelling study of how the cigarette industry, an industry that has a very powerful and deeply negative impact on health, developed, endured, and thrived. Whereas historians of medicine often focus on people who are trying to improve the health of the public, Brandt focuses on an industry whose commercial success has been devastating. To explain the cigarette’s deadly persistence, Brandt turns to a wide range of social, political, and economic developments. He examines the history of tobacco advertising, the history of lobbying, as well as the story of how tobacco products were excluded from the regulation to which food and drugs are subject. But the story is also one of science and new regulations—the rise of epidemiological connections between cancer, heart disease and cigarette smoking in the mid-20th century, and new efforts to curtail smoking and the industry’s power and influence. The book is impressive in its scope and offers amazing insights about the interactions of industry, politics, and public health.” Read more...
Best History of Medicine Books
Keith Wailoo, Historian
