Beginning in the early 1950s, a series of epidemiological, biochemical, pathological, and animal studies demonstrated a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. A number of reputable scientists challenged these findings, but for a variety of reasons, including the behavior of the tobacco industry, historians have assumed that these objections were insubstantial and disingenuous. Viewing these objections in scientific and medical perspective, however, suggests that there was a legitimate and reasonable scientific controversy over cigarette smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s and early 1960s. That controversy had important consequences. A new chronic disease epidemiology emerged, transforming the role and importance of epidemiology to medical research. This new epidemiology supplemented Koch's postulates, establishing a statistical method that allowed for linking environmental factors to the etiology of chronic diseases. The 1964 report to the surgeon general, Smoking and Health, represented the denouement and codification of these developments. This reexamination of the scientific controversy over smoking in the 1950s and early 1960s provides an important context for understanding the subsequent public relations battles between the tobacco industry and public health after 1964.
Anatomy -- Study and teaching -- Italy -- Padua -- History -- 16th century.
Fabricius, ab Aquapendente, ca. 1533-1619.
The history of anatomy includes not only professors and the support of their institutions but also medical students. Because medical students were quick to assess a teacher's pedagogy, their complaints tell us a great deal about the transition from Galenic to Aristotelian projects of anatomy. When Fabricius of Aquapendente instituted a new style of anatomical inquiry, one based on Aristotle and the search for universal principles, students repeatedly complained that his demonstrations did not provide technical education in structural anatomy (as demonstrations employing a hands-on, Galenic pedagogy did). Within the new anatomy theater (the second of its kind in Padua), however, students were persuaded to accept Fabricius's demonstrations. Fabricius's philosophical orientation combined with the formal atmosphere and aesthetic features of the new theater to create anatomy demonstrations that relied on orations and music for their structure (rather than on the progressive stages of human dissection). A place that emphasized a discourse of anatomy as the study of the "secrets of nature," the new theater so effectively publicized a new style of anatomy that a larger, more diverse group of spectators attended subsequent demonstrations and participated in the celebration of leading academic figures as well as the institution of the university.
anatomy theater, Andreas Vesalius, dissection, Fabricius of Aquapendente, Renaissance, sixteenth-century Padua, university history.
Parker, Samuel, 1640-1688. Free and impartial censure of the Platonick philosophie.
Mind and body.
Man (Christian theology)
Thomas Willis's description of the intercostal nerves has not received much attention by historians of medicine. Yet the intercostal nerves are of paramount importance for his neurology. Willis explained that via these nerves, which connect the brain to the heart and lower viscera, the brain controls the passions and instincts of the lower body. In other words, Willis believed that the intercostal nerves mediate a kind of rationality and that therefore they make a human a rational being. Willis's theory, I argue, must be seen in the context of the early modern mind-body problem. In the second part of the article I discuss how Oxford theologian Samuel Parker took up Willis's argument while stating that the intercostal nerves are the most important instruments (reins) of the soul. They control the bodily passions so that humans can transform into more virtuous beings. The explanation of the intercostal nerves offered by Willis and Parker fits the Anglican optimism about the abilities of human reason as well as about the moral potential of humankind.
anatomy, intercostal nerves, mind-body problem, natural philosophy, neurology, nervous system, Samuel Parker, soul, theology, Thomas Willis.
A recent article in Nature, arguing that "the misallocation of credit is endemic in science," used Selman Waksman as an illustration, claiming that the true discoverer of streptomycin was one of his graduate students. The article received wide publicity and seriously damaged Waksman's great reputation. What actually happened was that the success of penicillin stimulated Merck to fund research by Waksman, a soil scientist, into the collection of actinomycetes that he had assembled over thirty years. He applied the systematic, uncreative testing techniques that had made the German pharmaceutical industry so successful to these, and streptomycin was discovered within a matter of months. Work in the Mayo Institute then showed that it was marvelously effective against tuberculosis, and Waksman received the Nobel Prize for it in 1952. The test that turned out to be the crucial one could have been carried out by any of several students, but the lucky one was Albert Schatz. He then sued the university for a share of the royalties payable by Merck and also petitioned the Nobel committee to include him in the award. Although he obtained a very substantial out-of-court settlement, this probably damaged his subsequent academic career, and he has never ceased to argue his case for recognition, of which the Nature article is a reflection. To claim that Waksman took credit properly due to Schatz is to fail to understand that once pharmaceutical research had become primarily a matter of large- scale, routine testing, little individual creativity was left in this work. Credit for any successful results must therefore be given to whoever is the originator or director of a particular program. Nature refused to publish evidence that this case could not be used as an example of misallocation of credit for discovery. This in itself illustrates that editors of scientific journals should be every bit as mindful of scientists' reputations as they are of scientific facts.
antibiotics, credit for discovery, editorial duty of care, Nature, Albert Schatz, Selman Waksman.