Doctors and Tobacco

 Something we've talked about in class is the authority that scientists hold in our society. Up to a certain point, I tend to lend myself to hold scientific findings and facts concrete and authoritative. I do realize, however, that science can often be biased, especially when portrayed through the media. It's important to understand who, why, and how certain findings came about. I had a similar discussion in a lecture for my other anthropology class this semester, a class about the cultures and politics of tobacco. For a while, well before the Surgeon General's Report in 1964, the health effects of tobacco were widely disputed. There had been studies contributing to the public knowledge that tobacco was associated to cancer, but none of them strictly showed a causation between the cigarette (and other tobacco products) and lung cancer (or other types of cancer).

Tobacco held a huge force in society at the time, as it still does now, and advertising was a main part of the tactics to keep the population smoking and to get more the population to start. In class we looked at a wide variety of advertising methods--racialized messages, heavily gendered messages, and so on. The most interesting and relevant for this class for me were the pseudo-scientific and doctor's office advertisements (from probably the 1930s). I find them interesting for a multitude of reasons, probably the most significant being the irony of the messages these ads give out compared to the stance on cigarettes from doctors now.

I also found interesting, however, the significance of using the doctor, a scientific authority, in advertisements of a product like cigarettes. Similar to the "ask your doctor" pharmaceutical drugs we see on T.V. and in magazines now, the cigarette companies pulled on the idea of the doctor being a figure of health, knowledge, and absolute truth. They give the idea that if a doctor smokes a certain brand of cigarettes, then you should smoke that brand of cigarette. It
makes me think about some of the discussions we've have in class about the authority science can hold in society. This authority is warranted in some cases, but also can be problematic and even dangerous. In this case, using science to advertise cigarettes was dangerous, and now ironic.