Tobacco Heart?

Is smoking a cause of heart disease? This perennial question exercised a group of eminent doctors at the American Medical Association meeting last summer. Last week the Journal of the A. M. A. printed their arguments. The doctors puffed clouds of argumentative smoke.

Dr. Frederick Arthur Willius of the Mayo Clinic presented a statistical study (compiled with a couple of pals) comparing the health of several thousand smokers and non-smokers who had visited the clinic. Conclusions: 1) in 569 smokers between the ages of 40 and 59, there was three times as much heart disease as in a similar number of nonsmokers; 2) "beyond 60 years of age, no noteworthy differences were observed."

Other doctors promptly pitched into these statements. Some pitchers-in:

> Dr. Francis Daniel Murphy of Milwaukee: "White and Sharber* in 1934 stated that the incidence of coronary heart disease is even higher in non-smokers than in smokers. ..."

> Dr. George Rudolph Herrmann of Galveston, Tex.: "We see only the few sick smokers and lose sight of the great number of smokers who have no symptoms to cause them to consult us. ... We are likely to be obsessed ... by our meagre clinical experiences."

> Dr. William Daniel Stroud of Philadelphia: "[This is] like the subject of athlete's heart. We feel today that the reason many athletes die in their fifties or sixties of coronary disease is not that they were athletic but that they were born with a ... [predisposing] tendency. . . . Five or six years ago ... a Harvard crew returned to college after some 50 years--all were over 70. They entered a shell and rowed down the Charles River. The only man in the crew who had died was the coxswain!"

*Journal of the A. M. A., March 3, 1934.

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