Anatomic Changes in the Lungs Following Thoracoplasty

Tobacco and Health

“…Oscar Auerbach at the Veterans Administration Hospital in East Orange, New Jersey, for example, gained wide attention for his detailed studies of how lung tissues degrade when exposed to smoke; Auerbach had begun these studies in the early 1950s, and within a few years had managed to demonstrate the stages by which tobacco transforms healthy lung tissues into precancerous and then cancerous states. 100 Ludmerer also ignores the fact that the crucial epidemiological studies of the 1940s and 1950s themselves wereexperimental--using carefully-selected control groups to ensure that the results were not biased in some respect. Scholars knew that it was important not to compare, say, smokers from working class backgrounds with non-smokers from wealthier households, since there might be other differences between these two groups causing one or the other to get cancer (from exposure to occupational carcinogens, for example).…”