Today, it's common knowledge that smoking is an unhealthy habit. But it was the work of Dr. Auerbach in the 1960s that first prompted public health authorities to educate and warn Americans about the dangers of smoking.
Oscar Auerbach was born on January 1, 1905 in New York City to Jewish European immigrants. He studied medicine at New York Medical College, graduating in 1929 with his medical degree. He also briefly studied pathology at the University of Vienna and then worked at Sea View Hospital, a municipal tuberculosis center on Staten Island.
During World War II, Dr. Auerbach served two years in the U.S. Navy and then went to work at the Veterans Administration Hospital in New Jersey. During his time at the hospital, he served as chief of laboratory services and then as a senior medical investigator, positions that enabled him to engage in much of the critical research around smoking and cancer.
After carrying out preliminary studies, he received support from the American Cancer Society (ACS) to examine the relationship between smoking and cancer. In one study, Dr. Auerbach investigated 402 autopsy cases at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He spent hours looking at slides of the human tissue - about 50 slides per case - under the microscope, carefully coding each slide.
He noted if the cells on each slide were damaged and whether the patient had cancer or precancerous symptoms. Dr. Auerbach noticed that precancerous cells were minimal in men who never smoked and highly concentrated in those who were regular smokers. In another study, he looked at a total of 41,690 slides from 758 subjects, 72 of whom had quit smoking at least five years earlier. He found that those who quit earlier were in much better health at the time of death than those who continued to smoke.
Dr. Auerbach's meticulous approach to his research made him a credible source for his colleagues and policymakers - one of his papers was based on data from 22,000 slides. The damaging consequences of smoking were visible under the microscope. It was clear that the more people smoked, the more cancerous growth was present. He also co-wrote many papers on the effects of second-hand smoking and showed that filtered cigarettes are less harmful than unfiltered ones.
Dr. Auerbach did other experiments to show the connection between smoking and cancer. One experiment that received a lot of attention involved dogs. He trained 86 beagles to smoke through a tracheotomy. Twelve of the dogs who smoked regularly for a period of two and half years developed cancer. According to the ACS, which funded the study, it was the first study to show that large animals exposed to cigarette smoke developed tumors.
