Columbia University. She is a clinical associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her essays have appeared in Slate, the Atlantic, NPR, and elsewhere.
Schattner applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk About Cancer, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book covers the first U.S. blow-up on cancer and smoking. In 1954, a decade before their American counterparts, British health officials recognized tobacco’s ill effects on health. When the British health minister announced a causative relationship between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer, newspapers covered it variably. The Baltimore Sun placed “Sure Smoking–Lung Cancer Link” on page 1, near the bottom in an inverted “L,” framing another story: “Smoker-Grandma Dies At Age Of 101.”Visit Elaine Schattner's website.
This page—on the tobacco controversy—reveals two themes of my book: journalism, and confusion about cancer’s causes. In From Whispers to Shouts, I report how news about cancer has evolved. A hundred years ago, progressive journalists cooperated with cancer specialists to spread word of cancer’s curability. Today, editors and reporters question physicians, often challenging their views. Social media has further confounded the relationship between health journalists and medical experts.
The tobacco controversy is a personal highlight of my book because, in researching this episode, I was stunned by the pervasiveness and insidiousness of the tobacco lobby’s reach. Here on page 99, I tell how newspapers highlighted doubts raised by physicians and scientists about tobacco as a carcinogen. Even after researchers affiliated with the American Cancer Society published a huge study based on interviews with over 185,000 men, connecting smoking to lung cancer, doctors questioned the link. The National Cancer Institute’s Dr. Wilhelm Hueper insisted that auto fumes and air pollution were more significant causes of cancer than are cigarettes. In 1954, companies formed the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (later, Committee for Tobacco Research) to counter public discussion of tobacco’s harms. In 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General released a formal report tying cigarettes to lung cancer in men, the tobacco industry pushed back. As I consider in Chapter 6, Americans were slow to give up smoking. The Committee for Tobacco Research and its allies opposed limits to cigarette advertising and supported research into cancer’s other causes, such as genetics. The committee paid for research into bogus psychological causes of cancer, such as suppressed emotions.
This discussion pertains to later chapters, in which I consider how some people blame cancer patients for their illness, and the book’s final chapter: “Can We Prevent Cancer?”
--Marshal Zeringue
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