Lung cancer, chronic disease epidemiology, and medicine, 1948-1964

Beginning in the early 1950s, a series of epidemiological, biochemical, pathological, and animal studies demonstrated a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. A number of reputable scientists challenged these findings, but for a variety of reasons, including the behavior of the tobacco industry, historians have assumed that these objections were insubstantial and disingenuous. Viewing these objections in scientific and medical perspective, however, suggests that there was a legitimate and reasonable scientific controversy over cigarette smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s and early 1960s. That controversy had important consequences. A new chronic disease epidemiology emerged, transforming the role and importance of epidemiology to medical research. This new epidemiology supplemented Koch's postulates, establishing a statistical method that allowed for linking environmental factors to the etiology of chronic diseases. The 1964 report to the surgeon general, Smoking and Health, represented the denouement and codification of these developments. This reexamination of the scientific controversy over smoking in the 1950s and early 1960s provides an important context for understanding the subsequent public relations battles between the tobacco industry and public health after 1964.     

Anachronisms or failures? Family strategies in the sixteenth century, as drawn from collective biographies of solicitors in Aix-en-Provence

This article highlights the patterns that can be observed in the matrimonial alliances of solicitors in sixteenth-century Aix-en-Provence and family strategies understood as a corpus of rational decisions bearing on the long term. Defined this way, family strategies applied to sixteenth-century solicitors are an anachronism. The new and unstable context in which the sixteenth-century solicitor found himself prevented families from having a clear view of the objectives to achieve and from devising a rational strategy. The article presents the model that most of the solicitors' alliances followed and suggests the obstacles that appeared before the main actor in family planning, the one who wielded paternal authority, in the creation of these alliances. The example of the Maria family shows women who decided, against the will of their family, whom they would marry. This article highlights the historian's reconstruction of typical family behavior and the limited possibilities that families had to plan over the long term.     

Suffolk Place,Southwark, London: a Tudor palace and its terracotta architectural decoration

Suffolk Place (c. 1518–22), Southwark, was the London residence of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. This majestic palace is visible in the foreground of Wyngaerde’s London panorama (c. 1544), from which it can be inferred that it possessed a double courtyard plan. The southern and eastern ranges of the outer courtyard of Suffolk Place were apparently adorned with architectural terracottas at both entablature and parapet level. As the palace was demolished in 1557–58, the finds of ex-situ terracottas are a key source of information concerning the decorative scheme of this vanished palace. Petrological study and other research indicates that the terracottas were locally manufactured, implying the existence of a London-area workshop.