Effects of determining smoking hazards 100 years earlier or more

Suppose that - in the same way penicillin was discovered through mold and other advances were made by accident - some biologist starts looking at the lungs of tobacco users and thinks, "Boy, that's a lot grosser than normal people when they die," and this person stumbles upon a finding that smoking/tobacco use is harmful.

Obviously, it'll take a while, just as it took decades after the Surgeon General's Warning fro the idea to really take hold with people. But, what would be the result? Say it happened in the 1700s, and the nascent US's's tobacco industry nose-dives, could it advance the end of slavery in some states? Given this would be before or concurrent with germ theory, would it be possible for a different theory of disease to be advanced, that all disease is caused by "backers"? (Little things that are in tobacco and, likely other things, according to these ATL scientists)

Even if it was only a century early, discovery in the late 1800s would have interesting effects.
 
James I of England wrote "A Counterblaste to Tobacco" discussing its dangers as early as 1604. So at least some people suspected tobacco's harmful effects shortly after it was imported into Europe.
 
The main problem of tabaco is tar, which is one of the products that are created by burning the leafs.

A friend of mine, that is a smoker, did a test I had asked him relating to tabaco.

For a month he stop buying packs and started smoking cigars that he himself made with pure leaf. After the test period I asked him if he felt any difference between pure leaf and the common cigars you buy in packs. He said that pure leaf burns faster, isn't soo addicted and that is also weaker. I asked one of my teachers at Uny why the different reaction and he said that modern cigars are designed to be more addicted and has such they are more harmful because of higher concentrations.

Now why I wrote this is because the OP speaks about the harms of tabaco. For a person of the 18th/19th century to get the same sintomes as a modern smoker he would had to smoke in very very large quantities. So if they do the connection, and basing themselves on what they know, they will just conclud that heavy smoking is harmful, but that light smoking isn't, which we now know ain't true.

Now this could be the beginning of a period of adjustment in which people will get more interested in the effects of tabaco.
 

missouribob

Banned
Somehow tie tobacco into a racist hysteria against an immigrant/minority group in the United States around the 1890s so that as the United States is building its prohibitionist movement against drugs and alcohol tobacco by a quirk of this ATL get's lumped in too. I'm not sure what it would take to do that though.
 
Wow, thanks for the info, I never thought about the possibility of it increasing in potency; also very fascinati9ng about King James writing against it that early!
 
Somehow tie tobacco into a racist hysteria against an immigrant/minority group in the United States around the 1890s so that as the United States is building its prohibitionist movement against drugs and alcohol tobacco by a quirk of this ATL get's lumped in too. I'm not sure what it would take to do that though.

You could do it earlier with tobacco being tied to racist fears of Native Americans. Make it a "savage" practice associated with native religions.
 
What made tobacco use so much more noticeably lethal was that at some point in the 19th century, it became more common to inhale the smoke. This is directly associated with the increasing popularity of the cigarette starting in the late 19th century.

It was also known since the mid-19th century at the very least that tobacco use in any sort was bad for you. It's just it was wrapped up in the pseudoscience of Victorian moralism, hence the specific warnings given to women in anti-smoking pamphlets and such. There were also many products marketed in the 19th century to try and get people to quit, which predictably involved lots and lots of pseudoscience.

But was the state of medicine in the 19th century even conducive to determining things like this? The risks of asbestos wasn't known until the very end of the century, after all. And I don't even think that having science on your side would do much when the tobacco industry can just say "how do we know it's tobacco that causes these diseases and not polluted cities, workplaces, or homes or the person that causes this?" Yes, that's what they did in the 1950s onward, but it seems like a viable strategy to use regardless, and I doubt that science can produce papers as authoritative they did in the 1950s in, say, the 1850s or even 1890s.

So you're gonna need a straight up legal ban. Some Prohibitionists targetted tobacco use, and after Prohibition succeeded, parts of the movement targetted tobacco and actually succeeded at getting local and state bans passed that were poorly enforced. But if there's greater scientific evidence that's publically much more well known in the late 19th century, then tobacco prohibition could latch onto alcohol prohibition. However, this would give Prohibition powerful enemies in tobacco-growing states, so this could easily weaken the movement and ensure that there wouldn't be Prohibition of either alcohol or tobacco at the national level.

Associating it with moral panics is what would help fuel tobacco prohibition. Any anti-smoking movement is going to probably look like Nazi Germany's anti-smoking campaign, which goes back to the issues of the times--it's going to have lots of good ideas and factual science in it mixed with utter nonsense, including healthy doses of racism and old-school sexism.

Now why I wrote this is because the OP speaks about the harms of tabaco. For a person of the 18th/19th century to get the same sintomes as a modern smoker he would had to smoke in very very large quantities. So if they do the connection, and basing themselves on what they know, they will just conclud that heavy smoking is harmful, but that light smoking isn't, which we now know ain't true.

Now this could be the beginning of a period of adjustment in which people will get more interested in the effects of tabaco.

This is true, and it was of course well-known that heavy smoking was bad for you, if only under principles like "anything in excess is bad" and such.

I've talked to people born in the late 1950s and early 1960s and they have no memory of not knowing.

Not knowing what? Everyone heard about it, but it wasn't until the 1980s onward that public knowledge actually caught up. Public polling shows that significant amounts of people simply didn't believe it was an issue (in particular before the Surgeon General's report), leading to the conclusion that "it isn't a proven scientific fact that smoking causes lung cancer, so let's smoke anyway". Or put it this way, everyone in America knows that science says that humans are the primary cause of climate change, whether they chose to believe that and thus make decisions based on that knowledge, well, that's something else.
 
Its not a POD but "Coffin Nails: The Tabacco Controversy in the 19th Century" covers a lot of ground:

"Today, it has been established scientifically that using tobacco causes cancer; a fact now admitted even by some tobacco company officials. Although conclusive scientific data was not available until the mid-twentieth century, the first indication of the connection dates back two centuries earlier. In 1761, Dr. John Hill, a London physician, published a study linking the excessive use of snuff (powered tobacco inhaled through the nostril) with cancer of the nose. He reported that immoderate snuff users developed cancerous lesions, which could be fatal. In 1795, Dr. Samuel Thomas von Soemmering of Maine noted a correlation between lip cancer and pipe smoking......"
http://tobacco.harpweek.com/hubpages/CommentaryPage.asp?Commentary=Cancer
 
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