Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Alice Thomas Ellis, a British novelist celebrated for her witty, unflinching dissections of middle-class domestic life, died on Tuesday in London. She was 72 and lived in Wales.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Ellis’s literary agent, Robert Kirby, confirmed the death. No cause was given, but several British newspapers reported that Ms. Ellis had been ill with lung cancer for some time.
Far better known in Britain than in the United States, Ms. Ellis’s fiction defied easy categorization. With its blend of the transcendently spiritual and the achingly mundane, her work was compared, variously, to that of Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark.

Alice Thomas Ellis was the pseudonym of Anna Margaret Haycraft, who under her real name was an editor at Gerald Duckworth, the London publishing house run by her husband, Colin Haycraft.

Under her pen name, Ms. Ellis wrote a dozen slender novels, most published by Duckworth, among them “The Sin Eater” (1977); “The Birds of the Air” (1980); “The Summer House,” a trilogy (Penguin, 1994); and “Fairy Tale” (Moyer Bell, 1998). Her novel “The 27th Kingdom” (1982) was finalist for the Booker Prize.

She also published several nonfiction works, including “A Welsh Childhood” (Moyer Bell, 1997) and “Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity” (Hodder & Stoughton, 1994).

Only news today is of Alice Thomas Ellis, Welsh (Alice Thomas Ellis was the pseudonym of Anna Margaret Haycraft, who under her real name was an editor at Gerald Duckworth, the London publishing house run by her husband, Colin Haycraft.) She reportedly died of lung cancer, so for today’s ODDrambling, let’s type briefly about the history of lung cancer.

Up until the 20th Century, lung cancer was a medical ODDity. Sir William Osler, in the 1892 edition of his classic medical textbook”Principles and Practices of Medicine”devoted only a paragraph to lung cancer. In contrast, there were 73 pages about tuberculosis. He stated,”The conditions which predispose to it (lung cancer) are quite unknown. It is a remarkable fact that the workers in the Schneeberg cobalt mines are very liable to primary cancer of the lungs.” Big clue.

Now we know the exposure to radioactivity was the cause of lung cancer in the miners. Today, far and away the most common cause of lung cancer is smoking. The development of the automatic cigarette rolling machine for mass production of cigarettes, and the blending of milder tobaccos with other forms of tobacco with addicting nicotine allowed people to inhale cigarette smoke much more deeply in their lungs than they could harsher Turkish and burley tobaccos. Couple the highly addictive nature of nicotine, a whole lot of advertising, and other subtle factors, such as peer pressure preceived cultural coolness, and boom, lung cancer is now the leading cause of United States cancer death in both men and women.

In the United States, during the Cold War period when uranium mining was particularly active on the Colorado Plateau, lung cancer was seen in the uranium miners, with the rate even greater among miners who smoked. Here’s a link to an interesting book about the history of tobacco. One last thing, one day the ODDfellows badgered a friend about his smoking. He asked, ‘Would you rather it was HEROIN?’ Point taken.