XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.fan.holmes   
   From: peter@pmoylan.org   
      
   On 31/08/24 14:52, Tilde wrote:   
   >   
   > "Lung cancer was once a very rare disease, so rare that doctors took   
   > special notice when confronted with a case, thinking it a   
   > once-in-a-lifetime oddity. Mechanisation and mass marketing towards   
   > the end of the 19th century popularised the cigarette habit,   
   > however, causing a global lung cancer epidemic. Cigarettes were   
   > recognised as the cause of the epidemic in the 1940s and 1950s..."   
      
   I read a lot of science fiction from the 1940s and 1950s, and there one   
   finds that in the far distant future, in the days of the Galactic   
   Empire, for example, almost everyone smokes.   
      
   That's how the writers of the 1940s saw it. Nonsmokers were rare, and   
   seen as a bit nonconformist. Nobody seems to have predicted the   
   situation we have today, where smokers find a need to smoke in secrecy,   
   and everyone avoids them because they stink. We've had a rapid change in   
   attitudes.   
      
   --   
   Peter Moylan       peter@pmoylan.org    http://www.pmoylan.org   
   Newcastle, NSW   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)