Great Medical Mysteries by Richard Gordon

Author:Richard Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Stratus

15 Would Another Little Drink Do Us Any Harm?

It is interesting that most of the human race has a reserve of the enzyme necessary to render alcohol harmless to the body – as if nature meant us to drink alcohol, unlike animals to which alcohol is a poison.

BUPA News, 1982

16 Is Smoking Good For Us?

Sweet, when the morn is grey;

Sweet, when they’ve cleared away

Lunch, and at close of day

Possibly sweetest

cooed Charles Stuart Calverley’s Ode to Tobacco.

A century later, this fragrant Virginia haze in a Cambridge don’s rooms was prosaically turned into a cloud of poison gas by medical statisticians, neatly correlating an increase in lung cancer with an increase in smoking.

This was the first ringing challenge to the Captain of our Men of Death. Response was muted. Everyone had a grandfather who died at ninety while lighting his third cigarette before breakfast.

‘Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least,’ the Earl of Chesterfield told his son. Londoners in 1854 ridiculed the notion of cholera borne by the water, until Dr John Snow proved it by stealing the handle of the Soho pump (he had the agreeable posthumous honour of a local pub named after him). Americans in 1910 building the Panama Canal laughed at the fancy of deadly yellow fever brought by flimsy mosquitoes. English aristocrats die on the hunting field every season from sporting traditional toppers, not hard hats like farmers. Men prefer looking stupid to the knowing rather than faint-hearted to the general.

The directors of cigarette companies surely sat as shamed as the board of the White Star Line, who failed to provide enough lifeboats for the Titanic. They surely contemplated converting their factories to marmalade, expelling their workers to draw the dole in sackcloth and ash.

Luckily, these far-seeing men did nothing of the sort. They preserved the European and American economies, and society as we know it (largely from television).

It took thirty years before chastened tobacco executives complained that national Don’t Smoke Days (you chew a raw carrot instead) threatened personal freedom. Or dared to advertise in the London papers with the calm authority of Mr Pecksniff – ‘Did you know that over 40% of the adult population smoke and pay £11,500,000 a day in taxes on tobacco?’ Otherwise pushing up sales tax by seven per cent and income tax by seventeen per cent more than the straitened British paid for fighting Hitler.

How modest they are!

Did they know that (deducting £750,000 a day for National Health treatment of smoking-related cancers, coronaries and chronic bronchitis, a mere speck of ash in the cash) zealously self-sacrificing, patriotic smokers save the country uncountable millions a day in medical and social care for the non-existent elderly?

Britain’s lucky working population of 26 million must support as well as themselves a 12 million population of over-sixties, who will increase – as in Europe and the United States – by fifteen per cent in the next forty years. Our Ship of State is ballasted with geriatric slag.

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