Robert Evans

But you can see how a person who is not like in the pocket of big tobacco could make that mistake.

Yeah.

His reasoning is not inherently unsound.

Right.

He's wrong, but but not because he's like, again, later, all the scientists on the other side of this will be doing something fundamentally dishonest.

These are just people trying to understand the human body in a period in which we don't have that much information about it.

Other scientists would argue that the rise in lung cancer was attributed to the fact that life expectancy had risen a lot in the first quarter of the 20th century.

People were getting more weird cancers, they argued, because people were living longer.

Maybe lung cancer has always been normal once you hit a certain age and we just didn't have that many people reaching it.

Again, these are not inherently illogical arguments.

Now, there were, however, doctors early on who figured out what was happening, who knew and who put together that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer, but it took data a long time to catch up with that.

For one thing, epidemiology is in its infancy in this period of time.

The first small batch studies, and by the late 20s, we have studies that show a correlation between smoking and lung cancer, but there's no control group.

So all they show it, so there's no group of people who don't smoke to see what their lung cancer rates are because that's not a normal part of medical science yet.

They're starting to do that.

They're figuring out like, oh yeah, you should have fucking control groups in your medical studies.

But it's not the thing that you just do de rigueur at this point in time.

It becomes it partly as a result of this research.

And in fact, there's a 1928 article in the New England Journal of Medicine in which this, that points out like, um,

It shows a link between smoking and lung cancer, but it also points out that their study and other similar studies are of little value without similar studies on individuals without cancer, without control groups, right?