This book is startling, original, enormously disturbing, horribly unscientific but compelling. Did you know that Dachau housed the world’s first and largest organic garden, established to produce various foods, including honey, for the German elite? Or that to find a ‘healthier cigarette’, 12 billion were manufactured using asbestos filters? Production stopped because the filters removed too much of the taste, not because of increased delivery of cancer-causing agents to the body. And who says history doesn’t repeat itself? In the UK, the care of the elderly infirm has long been dumped on local authorities and this government now plans to restrict specialist help for patients with chronic diseases. It is sobering to read that similar schemes were developed in prewar Germany to rid the state of the burden of looking after non-productive citizens.
By the late 1930s, German scientists who ‘had trained many of the world’s greatest physicians and captured half of all Nobel prizes’ had clearly demonstrated the risks of smoking, such that pregnant women were barred from buying cigarettes, compulsory nicotine-withdrawal clinics were established for people with smoking-related diseases and smoking was banned on trains and in many public places. However, prolonged global conflict and an increasing ‘enthusiasm for industrial advances and the social and economic forces that lie behind them’, allowed the tobacco companies to bury this information, and the health of another whole generation was compromised before common sense (and science) again prevailed (but not yet in the developing world).
Dr Davis explains these parallels in her book and shows from a range of industrial and environmental toxins — asbestos, benzene, coal tar, DDT, dioxins, ethylene oxide, heavy metals, vinyl chloride and x-rays, to name but a few — how industry, politicians, scientists, the judiciary and doctors (yes, doctors) colluded to mask the significance of many industrial processes for health.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in