Ned, one example is, that proposals to ban smoking in public places had emerged inside the early 1980s, PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20023128 in all probability from California or some similarly wellness conscious MedChemExpress (??)-MCP culture. I assumed that such proposals came soon after publication of scientific research on the dangers of environmental tobacco smoke. Not so. The records summarised in Denial Delay reveal that the National Society for Non-Smokers was lobbying the UK Residence Workplace for such bans throughout 1954-7. In 1988 I enthusiastically approached the writers of regional television dramas to encourage them to include things like storylines on smoking and quitting. This, I found in Chapter five, had been accomplished at the very least after before–in the BBC soap opera Compact in 1964. Similarly, I had believed that the nicotine aerosol device was a really recent concept, emerging out of technological innovations and also the predicted convergence from the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries. Wrong once again. Lennox Johnston, a basic prac-denounced; James I issued his famous Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604. There was a powerful antismoking movement in Victorian occasions, plus the reforms on the Children’s Act of 1908 included prohibition in the sale of tobacco to anyone aged under 16. In 1962 a report by the Royal College of Physicians, Smoking and Wellness, presented the health-related dangers towards the public clearly enough. But, as contemporary media reports show, proof considered by scientists to bear only one particular interpretation may be reconstructed in incredibly distinct strategies. The Day-to-day Express railed against interfering paternalism and sniffed a conspiracy to raise taxes. Medical doctors feel frustrated when sufferers defy what seems unassailably rational assistance to quit smoking. They react by demonising the behaviour of tobacco businesses and the addictive energy of nicotine. But the explanation is more difficult. In this book Hilton shows how smoking is deeply embedded inside a cultural framework that continues to associate the habit with positive attributes. A cigar is never just a cigar.Christopher N Martyn BMJDenial Delay: The Political History of Smoking and Overall health 1951-1964, Scientists, Government and Market as seen within the papers in the Public Records OfficeDavid PollockAction on Smoking and Health, , pp 166 ISBN 1 872428 44 four Rating:t is easy to overlook that a problem does not come into existence merely at the earliest point of our own institutional memory. Reading Pollock’s account of your reactions of government officials to early scientific findings on the link amongst smoking and disease was for that reason a disturbing knowledge. It was disconcerting to discoverBMJ VOLUME 321 five AUGUST 2000 bmj.comItitioner from Wallasey, proposed such a device for the Health-related Research Council in 1942. Fascinating because the quite a few anecdotes are, they may be not the principle explanation to read this book. This history of early efforts to lower smoking shows how scientific caution, bureaucratic inertia, ideological squeamishness about government involvement in private matters, commercial pressures, as well as the private situations of a variety of players combined to prevent the adoption of easy, low cost measures that could have saved thousands of families from losing a child, a parent, or maybe a spouse in middle age. It provides critical insights to all these functioning in tobacco control and is an invaluable case study for any political scientist, well being activist, or doctor who seeks to influence government wellness policy. As we await the British government’s response to extended overdue expressions of offici.