50 years of reporting on tobacco and health

The BMJ will publish a theme issue on tobacco control in August 2000

Education and debate p 111

In September 1950 the BMJ published a landmark case-control study by Doll and Hill from which the authors concluded that cigarette smoking was an important factor in causing lung cancer.1 Later that decade the BMJ published seminal papers by the same investigators from their prospective mortality study of British doctors, confirming the role of smoking in the growing epidemic of lung cancer. 2 3 Since then the journal has continued to report important findings on tobacco and health: a search of the BMJ archive (www.bmj.com) from January 1994 to December 1999 yielded 434 articles with “tobacco” or “smoking” in the title or …