Do the numbers.
Okay, hit the reverse button on the time machine
and go back 100 years. Sir William Osler
has published the sixth edition of “The Principles and Practices of Medicine,”
the definitive medical textbook of his time. In it, he devotes page after page to tuberculosis, but less than a page-and-a-half to lung cancer, stating, “The conditions which predispose to it (lung cancer) are quite unknown.”
Now reset the machine forward to just after the end of World War II, when Sir Richard Doll, today’s departed one, began epidemiological studies trying to explain the dramatic rise in lung cancer occuring in Great Britain. The notorious English air pollution
, automobiles and road tar were all considered as possible explanations. Somewhat to his surprise, of the initial lung cancer patients questioned, 647 out of 649 smoked. Sir Richard, a smoker at the time, stopped. Of note, when the Ministry of Health released the definitive report in 1957, the Minister reported the findings while smoking a cigarette.
This brings us to our ODDthought-of-the-day:
Reset the time machine to 1607.
On the banks of the James River, 60 miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, two Algonquian Indians
see the Virginia Company
struggle ashore. One turns the other and says:
“These white people are bad news. Wherever they’ve gone down South, they’ve spread disease, enslaved and killed people, and stolen their lands and treasure. But, they keep coming, and they have better technology. There’s no way we can stop them.”
“Don’t take such a short term view,” says the other Indian.
“What do you mean?”
“We may not be able to do them in right now, but we can get them in the long-run.”
“Really? How?”
“We’ll teach them how to grow tobacco .”
Using the most aggressive, faux-Indian Ward Churchill
-approved estimates, there were 18 million
Indians in North America when Columbus sailed into the Caribbean. By the 20th century, this had been reduced to about a million, or a net loss of 17 million Indians. The conservative estimate of the annual rate of tobacco-related death in the U.S.
is roughly 500,000. Thus, between 1954 and 2004, at least 25 million Americans died from smoking. (The Algonquian Indians turn to one another, smile and nod their heads, and start to walk towards Jamestown
.)
Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.
Winston Churchill
