Tobacco, like the nylon stockings of cancer epidemiology, thus vanished from the view of preventive medicine. And with its medical hazards largely hidden, cigarette usage grew even more briskly, rising at a dizzying rate throughout the western hemisphere. By the time the cigarette returned to visibility as arguably the world’s most lethal carrier of carcinogens, it would be far too late. The lung cancer epidemic would be in full spate, and the world would be deeply, inextricably ensconced, as the historian Allan Brandt once characterized it, in “the cigarette century.”
