Document X86dwkVZxYpBQKnqMYBJ2JEg4

184 CHAPTER 6 Fig. 6.3. "Is It Really Just by Chance That Men Suffer So Much More Often Than Women from Diseases of the Lungs?" This sexual asymmetry was an important early clue to the carcinogenic action of tobacco. Source: Fritz Lickint, Tabakgenuss und Gesundheit (Hanover: Bruno Wilkens, 1936). many subsequent investigators: Victor Mertens, Angel Roffo, and T. Chikamatsu, for example, all of whom demonstrated the carci nogenic potency of tobacco tar while crediting Lickint's pioneering vision (see figs. 6.3 and 6.4).39 Lickint went on to become Germany's foremost exponent of the antismoking message, cautioning that tobacco had surpassed alco hol as a public health menace and that strong steps needed to be taken to counter the threat. In his monumental Tabak und Organismus (Tobacco and the organism), published in 1939, Lickint chronicled an extraordinary range of ills deriving from smoking, chewing, or snorting tobacco. The 1,100-page volume, produced in collaboration with the Reich Committee for the Struggle against Addictive Drugs and the German Antitobacco League, was adver tised as Das Standardwerk and is arguably the most comprehensive scholarly indictment of tobacco ever published. Surveying eight thousand publications worldwide, the author blamed tobacco for cancers all along the Rauchstrasse ("smoke alley")--Ups, tongue. THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST TOBACCO 185 Xlidfopf firnritoi timbddelBihoj! Rachen Zmuje Ltppen Hantwege SpelserUhre RectomaAnus Hagen Haul Darin Geachlechtcorgane Bmatdrneen notoo naso tonio oo ad Hitdel Krebsvertshmg adIkidiETuNldilraucher Fig. 6.4. "Cancer's Distribution among Smokers and Nonsmokers." Angel H. Roffo assembled this chart to show that smokers (Raucher) were far more likely than nonsmokers (Nichtraucher) to suffer from cancer. The chart shows that 95 percent of all cancers of the larynx (Kehlkopf) occurred in smokers; cancers of the lung, mouth, throat, tongue, and bladder were also far more likely to strike smokers. Cancers of the breast (Brustdriisen), by contrast, were far more common among nonsmokers (because the disease primarily afflicts women, and women did not smoke much). Source: Reine Luft 24 (1942): 17; also in Lickint, Tabak und Organismus, p. 919. lining of the mouth, jaw, esophagus, windpipe, and lungs. Tobacco was an instigator not just of cancer but of arteriosclerosis, infant mortaUty, ulcers, halitosis, and dozens of other maladies.40 To bacco was a powerful drug: tobacco addiction he characterized as Nikotinismus (or, more properly, Tabakismus), and the people so af flicted as Nikotinisten (or Tabakisten).41 He also compared tobacco addicts to morphine addicts and made a convincing argument that "passive smoking" (Passivrauchen--he seems to have coined the term) posed a serious threat to nonsmokers.42 Lickint argued that thousands of cancer deaths could be prevented by curtailing to bacco use: 20 percent of all male fatal cancers began in the area he dubbed the "Rauchstrasse," leading him to speculate that tobacco might play a major role in as many as seven thousand male cancer deaths per year in Germany.43