Becker Library to co-host traveling exhibit “Not a Cough in a Carload”

The Bernard Becker Medical Library and the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center will co-host the traveling exhibit titled “Not a Cough in a Carload: The Campaign by the Tobacco Industry to Hide the Hazards of Smoking” beginning Monday, March 1 through Friday, April 30.

The exhibit has been created by Robert K. Jackler, M.D., the Sewall Professor and chair of otolaryngology and associate dean at Stanford University School of Medicine.

In addition, Jackler will give a free, public lecture about his exhibit at noon Tuesday, March 9, in Connor Auditorium in the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center. He also will be the speaker for the Department of Otolaryngology Grand Rounds Wednesday, March 10.

In 2006, Jackler and his wife, Laurie, an artist, began collecting old magazine ads featuring medical imagery to promote cigarette smoking. By using images of physicians and scientists, the ads were intended to provide “facts,” “data” and “evidence” that cigarette smoking was supported by the medical field and to imply various health benefits from smoking, such as weight loss, relaxation and pleasure.

Using their own advertising images, the exhibit shows how tobacco companies used deceptive and often blatantly false claims to reassure the public of the safety of their products.

In 1950, medical student Ernest Wynder (MD 1950) working with Evarts A. Graham, MD, former Bixby Professor and chair of the department of surgery (1919-1951) and research assistant Adele Croninger (MA 1948), were the first to scientifically demonstrate the causal link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. The Becker Medical Library Archives holds the Evarts A. Graham papers, documenting this research.