“Coffins of black”

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue,

Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep,

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep . . .

And so he was quiet, & that very night.

As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight

That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack

Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black

—William Blake

In 1775, more than a century before Ehrlich fantasized about chemotherapy or Virchow espoused his theory of cancer cells, a surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital named Percivall Pott noticed a marked rise in cases of scrotal cancer in his clinic. Pott was a methodical, compulsive, reclusive man, and his first impulse, predictably, had been to try to devise an elegant operation to excise the tumors. But as cases streamed into his London clinic, he noticed a larger trend. His patients were almost invariably chimney sweeps or “climbing-boys”—poor, indentured orphans apprenticed to sweeps and sent up into chimneys to clean the flues of ash, often nearly naked and swathed in oil. The correlation startled Pott. It is a disease, he wrote, “peculiar to a certain set of people . . .; I mean the chimney-sweepers’ cancer. It is a disease which always makes its first attack on . . . the inferior part of the scrotum; where it produces a superficial, painful, ragged, ill-looking sore, with hard and rising edges. . . . I never saw it under the age of puberty, which is, I suppose, one reason why it is generally taken, both by patient and surgeon, for venereal; and being treated with mercurials, is thereby soon and much exasperated.”

Pott might easily have accepted this throwaway explanation. In Georgian England, sweeps and climbing-boys were regarded as general cesspools of disease—dirty, consumptive, syphilitic, pox-ridden—and a “ragged, ill-looking sore,” easily attributed to some sexually transmitted illness, was usually treated with a toxic mercury-based chemical and otherwise shrugged off. (“Syphilis,” as the saying ran, “was one night with Venus, followed by a thousand nights with mercury.”) But Pott was searching for a deeper, more systematic explanation. If the illness was venereal, he asked, why, of all things, the predilection for only one trade? If a sexual “sore,” then why would it get “exasperated” by standard emollient drugs?

Frustrated, Pott transformed into a reluctant epidemiologist. Rather than devise new methods to operate on these scrotal tumors, he began to hunt for the cause of this unusual disease. He noted that sweeps spent hours in bodily contact with grime and ash. He recorded that minute, invisible particles of soot could be found lodged under their skin for days, and that scrotal cancer typically burst out of a superficial skin wound that tradesmen called a soot wart. Sifting through these observations, Pott eventually pinned his suspicion on chimney soot lodged chronically in the skin as the most likely cause of scrotal cancer.

Pott’s observation extended the work of the Paduan physician Bernardino Ramazzini. In 1713, Ramazzini had published a monumental work—De Morbis Artificum Diatriba—that had documented dozens of diseases that clustered around particular occupations. Ramazzini called these diseases morbis artificum—man-made diseases. Soot cancer, Pott claimed, was one such morbis artificum—only in this case, a man-made disease for which the inciting agent could be identified. Although Pott lacked the vocabulary to describe it as such, he had discovered a carcinogen.^*

The implication of Pott’s work was far-reaching. If soot, and not some mystical, numinous humor (à la Galen), caused scrotal cancer, then two facts had to be true. First, external agents, rather than imbalances of internal fluids, had to lie at the root of carcinogenesis—a theory so radical for its time that even Pott hesitated to believe it. “All this makes it (at first) a very different case from a cancer which appears in an elderly man, whose fluids are become acrimonious from time,” he wrote (paying sly homage to Galen, while undermining Galenic theory).

Second, if a foreign substance was truly the cause, then cancer was potentially preventable. There was no need to purge the body of fluids. Since the illness was man-made, its solution could also be man-made. Remove the carcinogen—and cancer would stop appearing.

But the simplest means of removing the carcinogen was perhaps the most difficult to achieve. Eighteenth-century England was a land of factories, coal, and chimneys—and by extension, of child labor and chimney sweeps servicing these factories and chimneys. Chimney sweeping, though still a relatively rare occupation for children—by 1851, Britain had about eleven hundred sweeps under the age of fifteen—was emblematic of an economy deeply dependent on children’s labor. Orphans, often as young as four and five years old, were “apprenticed” to master sweeps for a small price. (“I wants a ’prentis, and I am ready to take him,” says Mr. Gamfield, the dark, malevolent chimney sweep in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. By an odd stroke of luck, Oliver is spared from being sold to Gamfield, who has already sent two previous apprentices to their deaths by asphyxiation in chimneys.)

But political winds changed. By the late eighteenth century, the embarrassing plight of London’s climbing-boys was publicly exposed, and social reformers in England sought to create laws to regulate the occupation. In 1788, the Chimney Sweepers Act was passed in Parliament, preventing master sweeps from employing children under eight (children over eight were allowed to be apprenticed). In 1834, the age was raised to fourteen, and in 1840 to sixteen years. By 1875, the use of young climbing-boys was fully forbidden and the profession vigorously policed to prevent infractions. Pott did not live to see the changes—he contracted pneumonia and died in 1788—but the man-made epidemic of scrotal cancer among sweeps vanished over several decades.

If soot could cause cancer, then were such preventable causes—and their cancer “artificia”—strewn about in the world?

In 1761, more than a decade before Pott had published his study on soot cancer, an amateur scientist and apothecary in London, John Hill, claimed that he had found one such carcinogen concealed in another innocuous-seeming substance. In a pamphlet entitled Cautions against the Immoderate Use of Snuff, Hill argued that snuff—oral tobacco—could also cause lip, mouth, and throat cancer.

Hill’s evidence was no weaker or stronger than Pott’s. He, too, had drawn a conjectural line between a habit (snuff use), an exposure (tobacco), and a particular form of cancer. His culprit substance, often smoked as well as chewed, even resembled soot. But Hill—a self-professed “Bottanist, apothecary, poet, stage player, or whatever you please to call him”—was considered the court jester of British medicine, a self-promoting amateur dabbler, part scholar and part buffoon. While Pott’s august monograph on soot cancer circulated through the medical annals of England drawing admiration and praise, Hill’s earlier pamphlet, written in colorful, colloquial language and published without the backing of any medical authority, was considered a farce.

In England, meanwhile, tobacco was rapidly escalating into a national addiction. In pubs, smoking parlors, and coffeehouses—in “close, clouded, hot, narcotic rooms”—men in periwigs, stockings, and lace ruffs gathered through the day and night to pull smoke from pipes and cigars or sniff snuff from decorated boxes. The commercial potential of this habit was not lost on the Crown or its colonies. Across the Atlantic, where the tobacco had originally been discovered and the conditions for cultivating the plant were almost providentially optimal, production increased exponentially decade by decade. By the mid-1700s, the state of Virginia was producing thousands of tons of tobacco every year. In England, the import of tobacco escalated dramatically between 1700 and 1770, nearly tripling from 38 million pounds to more than 100 million per year.

It was a relatively minor innovation—the addition of a piece of translucent, combustible paper to a plug of tobacco—that further escalated tobacco consumption. In 1855, legend runs, a Turkish soldier in the Crimean War, having run out of his supply of clay pipes, rolled up tobacco in a sheet of newspaper to smoke it. The story is likely apocryphal, and the idea of packing tobacco in paper was certainly not new. (The papirossi, or papelito, had traveled to Turkey through Italy, Spain, and Brazil.) But the context was pivotal: the war had squeezed soldiers from three continents into a narrow, blasted peninsula, and habits and mannerisms were destined to spread quickly through its trenches like viruses. By 1855, English, Russian, and French soldiers were all puffing their tobacco rations rolled up in paper. When these soldiers returned from the war, they brought their habits, like viruses again, to their respective homelands with them.

The metaphor of infection is particularly apposite, since cigarette smoking soon spread like a fierce contagion through all those nations and then leapt across the Atlantic to America. In 1870, the per capita consumption in America was less than one cigarette per year. A mere thirty years later, Americans were consuming 3.5 billion cigarettes and 6 billion cigars every year. By 1953, the average annual consumption of cigarettes had reached thirty-five hundred per person. On average, an adult American smoked ten cigarettes every day, an average Englishman twelve, and a Scotsman nearly twenty.

Like a virus, too, the cigarette mutated, adapting itself to diverse contexts. In the Soviet gulags, it became an informal currency; among English suffragettes, a symbol of rebellion; among American suburbanites, of rugged machismo, among disaffected youth, of generational rift. In the turbulent century between 1850 and 1950, the world offered conflict, atomization, and disorientation. The cigarette offered its equal and opposite salve: camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and the familiarity of habits. If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventable cause: tobacco.

It was precisely this rapid, viral ascendancy of tobacco that made its medical hazards virtually invisible. Our intuitive acuity about statistical correlations, like the acuity of the human eye, performs best at the margins. When rare events are superposed against rare events, the association between them can be striking. Pott, for instance, had discovered the link between scrotal cancer and chimney sweeping because chimney sweeping (the profession) and scrotal cancer (the disease) were both uncommon enough that the juxtaposition of the two stood out starkly like a lunar eclipse—two unusual occurrences in precise overlap.

But as cigarette consumption escalated into a national addiction, it became harder and harder to discern an association with cancer. By the early twentieth century, four out of five—and, in some parts of the world, nearly nine of ten—men were smoking cigarettes (women would soon follow). And when a risk factor for a disease becomes so highly prevalent in a population, it paradoxically begins to disappear into the white noise of the background. As the Oxford epidemiologist Richard Peto put it: “By the early 1940s, asking about a connection between tobacco and cancer was like asking about an association between sitting and cancer.” If nearly all men smoked, and only some of them developed cancer, then how might one tease apart the statistical link between one and the other?

Even surgeons, who encountered lung cancer most frequently, could no longer perceive any link. In the 1920s, when Evarts Graham, the renowned surgeon in St. Louis who had pioneered the pneumonectomy (the resection of the lung to remove tumors), was asked whether tobacco smoking had caused the increased incidence of lung cancer, he countered dismissively, “So has the use of nylon stockings.”

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.”