Number of words: 487

In England, meanwhile, tobacco was rapidly escalating into a national addiction. In pubs, smoking parlors, and coffeehouses—in “close, clouded, hot, narcotic rooms”—men in periwigs, stockings, and lace ruffs gathered through the day and night to pull smoke from pipes and cigars or sniff snuff from decorated boxes. The commercial potential of this habit was not lost on the Crown or its colonies. Across the Atlantic, where the tobacco had originally been discovered and the conditions for cultivating the plant were almost providentially optimal, production increased exponentially decade by decade. By the mid-1700s, the state of Virginia was producing thousands of tons of tobacco every year. In England, the import of tobacco escalated dramatically between 1700 and 1770, nearly tripling from 38 million pounds to more than 100 million per year.

It was a relatively minor innovation—the addition of a piece of translucent, combustible paper to a plug of tobacco—that further escalated tobacco consumption. In 1855, legend runs, a Turkish soldier in the Crimean War, having run out of his supply of clay pipes, rolled up tobacco in a sheet of newspaper to smoke it. The story is likely apocryphal, and the idea of packing tobacco in paper was certainly not new. (The papirossi, or papelito, had traveled to Turkey through Italy, Spain, and Brazil.) But the context was pivotal: the war had squeezed soldiers from three continents into a narrow, blasted peninsula, and habits and mannerisms were destined to spread quickly through its trenches like viruses. By 1855, English, Russian, and French soldiers were all puffing their tobacco rations rolled up in paper. When these soldiers returned from the war, they brought their habits, like viruses again, to their respective homelands with them.

The metaphor of infection is particularly apposite, since cigarette smoking soon spread like a fierce contagion through all those nations and then leapt across the Atlantic to America. In 1870, the per capita consumption in America was less than one cigarette per year. A mere thirty years later, Americans were consuming 3.5 billion cigarettes and 6 billion cigars every year. By 1953, the average annual consumption of cigarettes had reached thirty-five hundred per person. On average, an adult American smoked ten cigarettes every day, an average Englishman twelve, and a Scotsman nearly twenty.

Like a virus, too, the cigarette mutated, adapting itself to diverse contexts. In the Soviet gulags, it became an informal currency; among English suffragettes, a symbol of rebellion; among American suburbanites, of rugged machismo, among disaffected youth, of generational rift. In the turbulent century between 1850 and 1950, the world offered conflict, atomization, and disorientation. The cigarette offered its equal and opposite salve: camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and the familiarity of habits. If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventable cause: tobacco.

Excerpted from pages 240-241 of ‘The Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of Cancer’ by Siddharth Mukherjee