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Podcast: Today In History with The Retrospectors
Episode: Thank You For Not Smoking
Description: The world did NOT wake up to the dangers of smoking on September 25th, 1878, despite the efforts of Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, who had a letter published in The Times warning that smoking is a practice “deleterious to health and vitality,” noting that a contemporaneous experiment on dogs had led to “palsy of the hind leg, blindness, deafness, and death.” But early anti-smoking campaigners like Drysdale were fighting a losing battle anyway because they were up against a formidable enemy: technology itself, which every day was making cigarettes cheaper and cheaper to mass produce.