Why Are People Slow to Recognize Reality?

Reviewing Dr. Fritz Lickint's 1929 & 1935 papers on smoking and lung cancer.

Few people in the English speaking world have heard of the German internist and pioneering tobacco researcher, Fritz Balduin Lickint.

Fritz Lickint

Lickint was born in 1898 in Leipzig and died in 1960 in Heidelberg. He was the most important tobacco researcher of his time. He published a landmark study on the causal relationship between tobacco smoking and carcinoma of the lung in 1929 (“Tobacco and Tobacco Smoke as Etiological Factor of Carcinoma”) and he elaborated his exposition in 1935.

Lickint’s findings were published 15 years before Sir Austin Bradford Hill and Richard Doll published their landmark English language study (“Smoking and carcinoma of the lung: preliminary report.” Br Med J; 1950) and 29 years before the U.S. Surgeon General published its study about tobacco smoking and cancer.

In Lickint’s 1935 paper “The Bronchial Cancer of the Smoker,” he was unequivocal:

In my opinion, there can be no longer any doubt that tobacco smoke is a significant factor in the genesis of bronchial cancer …

Did Dr. Lickint possess some special power of observation, or is there some other explanation for why it took so long for the world to recognize the veracity of his observation?

Much of mankind’s slowness to appreciate Lickint’s observation was the considerable PR problem he suffered when the Nazi Party embraced his research. Hitler hated smoking and—as he frequently stated—he “intuitively knew” that it was bad for human health. This resulted in the misfortune that the first major government in the world to talk about the harms of smoking was that of Nazi Germany.

“Protect Your Organism": 1940 anti-smoking poster

This was just the beginning of the resistance to Lickint’s seminal observation. Another and even bigger problem was the enormous wealth generated by the tobacco industry—underscored by the fact that Doris Duke, heiress to the America Tobacco Company, was thought to be the richest woman in the world when her father died in 1925.

As moralists have long remarked, money has a strangely seductive and mesmerizing power over the human mind. As Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Not only does money mesmerize, it guarantees the generation of massive propaganda to keep it flowing.

Finally, the imitative nature of humans—i.e., “monkey see, monkey do”—makes it very difficult for the observant individual to persuade a mass of people to consider that their widely accepted belief is false.

Looking at photographs of my grandparents, taken at festive occasions in the 1940s and 50s, I note that in every image they are smoking cigarettes. I wish that someone had told my grandmother about Fritz Lickint’s 1935 study or at least Sir Austin’s 1950 study. Maybe, just maybe, it would have persuaded her to give up smoking much earlier than she did, which may have saved her (and my mother who cared for her) from a ghastly struggle with oral cancer when she was in her sixties.