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STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR BIOMEDICAL ETHICS
Presents
BIOMEDICAL ETHICS GRAND ROUNDS
WINTER/SPRING 2005
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
8 am — 9 am
Clark Center Auditorium
The Cigarette in Global Lung History: How Flue Curing, Matches, Mechanization, and Mass Marketing led to Mass Death and Deception
Robert N. Proctor, Ph.D.
Department of History, Stanford University
An estimated 5.5 trillion cigarettes are smoked every year: placed end to end, that is enough to make a chain stretching from the earth to the sun and back, with hundreds of billions left over for a few side trips to Mars. The consequences are deadly: the World Health Organization estimates that 5 million people are killed every year by cigarettes, a number expected to grow to 10 million/yr over the next few decades.
How did we come into such a world, what steps did the industry take to achieve its power, and what can be done to limit that power? The modern phenomenon of the cigarette must be seen as the outcome of mass marketing and mass deception; the history of the recognition of tobacco hazards must also be seen as shaped by industry efforts to hide those hazards.
Robert Proctor, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. Dr. Proctor specializes in 20th century science, technology, and medicine, especially the history of controversy in those fields and projects on scientific rhetoric and the history of expert witnessing.
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The Biomedical Ethics Grand Rounds are presented on the first Tuesday of each month from 8 — 9 am in the Clark Center Auditorium. Please contact the Center for Biomedical Ethics at 650-723-5760 for further information or visit our website at http://scbe.stanford.edu.