Translating Smoke Signals: West German Medicine and Tobacco Research, 1950-1970

摘要

The article examines West German medical discourse about smoking and lung cancer. Drawing on articles in medical journals and the press, books by physicians, documents in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and the German Federal Archive, it reconstructs the extent, sources and interpretation of tobacco-related knowledge. Medical writers, it finds, were well-informed about Nazi-era German and postwar international research. Researchers and physicians generally accepted the science of critical tobacco research by the 1960s. They did not, however, advance lung cancer and smoking to the status of a public-health crisis or call for state regulation of smoking. This response reflected a reaction against National Socialist health policies but was shaped, above all, by postwar conditions, institutions, and professional and corporate interests.