Re: Why did Doyle die so young? (Sir A.Conan Doyle died at the age of 71)

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       [email protected]    http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW