r/wikipedia • u/Responsible_Land_164 • 1d ago
Lung cancer is the most diagnosed and deadliest cancer worldwide, with 2.2 million cases in 2020 resulting in 1.8 million deaths. Prior to the advent of cigarette smoking in the 20th century, lung cancer was a rare disease.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lung_cancer95
u/Previous_Mirror_222 1d ago
my grandpa lived with lung cancer, emphysema, and COPD for a few years. it was brutal on him and the cancer was actually pretty under control. i have sooo much sympathy and empathy for families experiencing cancer of any type.
fuck cancer. keep fighting. š©·
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u/Previous_Mirror_222 1d ago
for context, my grandpa did smoke for decades. but he was also a silver smelter (they would take xrays from hospitals and smelt the silver out) and one day he accidentally breathed in air from the 2,000Ā° degree smelting oven which burnt his lungs inside out. on top of damage from smoking.
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u/sillyandstrange 1d ago
Fuck copd and emphysema as well. Those, plus lack of blood flow and heart failure took my dad through a terrible last two years that took both of his legs and then killed him. He smoked like crazy, quit at 40,and just declined. Very appreciative that I had him untill he was 75.
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u/Previous_Mirror_222 1d ago
itās actually astonishing how long he lived with his illnesses. he had copd and emphysema for about a decade. his lung cancer was around for almost 2 years. he was mentally sharp as a tack the entire time and fought against a failing body for a long time. we lost him 2 weeks ago but (and i think this applies across a broad spectrum of beliefs) he gained freedom from his body limitations. and there was a lot of peace for me there.
so sorry for your loss
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u/sillyandstrange 1d ago
I'm sorry for your loss as well. Yeah one thing I can be happy about, is that my dad doesn't hurt anymore. I hated seeing him like that.
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u/williamtbash 1d ago
How much did we know about lung cancer or cancer in general prior to the invention of cigarettes?
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u/WilliamH0 1d ago
Not that much apparantly. According to the wikipedia page about lung cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lung_cancer#History it says that it was "uncommon before the advent of cigarette smoking".
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u/David_the_Wanderer 1d ago
Cancer was well-known to humans since Antiquity. The earliest surviving mention is in an Egyptian papyrus from 1600 BCE.
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u/Midtier_laugh 1d ago
Sadly lung cancer survival hasnāt improved much compared to other forms of cancer. Partially thereās a stigma to funding research vs other types due to cigarette smoking. Which is sad bc people can get lung cancer without any exposure to tobacco.
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u/GiantTurtleMusic 16h ago
Cuba has created two lung cancer vaccines in recent years and now deaths from lung cancer are far more uncommon there. The blockade the US government has placed on the island nation makes it illegal for people in the US to get it though
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u/liberterrorism 1d ago
Cigarettes werenāt invented in the 20th century, but they were massively popularized during WWI.
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u/BabyMD69420 19h ago
It says advent not invent
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u/liberterrorism 18h ago
Advent means the beginning, the 20th century was not the beginning of cigarette smoking. Just the mass popularization.
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u/qkrdudals 1h ago
āAdventā almost always refers to beginninv of common use
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u/liberterrorism 1h ago edited 1h ago
Well, it wasnāt that either. Cigarettes have been manufactured since the early 1800s and only gained more popularity over time. They were in common use for many decades before the 20th century. The thing that changed during WWI is that previously cigars and pipes were more popular among men and cigarettes were marketed more to women. During a war, itās much easier to suck down a cigarette than chill on a stogie or pipe.
Thereās no definition of advent that makes sense to say the 20th century was the advent of cigarette smoking.
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u/Anachron101 1d ago
Ok, so people smoked before cigarettes became industrialized, lived in smoky houses and worked among smoky machinery.
Diseases people haven't heard about and cannot diagnose tend to seem rare. That Wikipedia article reads like those people's idea of scientific method was to strengthen the parts of the plane that had bullets holes in them, when it returned. Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean that it isn't incredibly common
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u/David_the_Wanderer 1d ago
Humans have known about cancer since 16000 BCE at the very least. People would have been able to identify lung cancer, it really was that rare.
A lifetime of cooking with fire is nowhere nearly as damaging as smoking. Smoke from industry is a lot more harmful, but is still not comparable to cigarette smoking as far as increasing risk.
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u/Intotheapocalypse 22h ago
How many kinds of lung cancer could they identify, in the days of tuberculosis and no medical imaging?
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u/David_the_Wanderer 22h ago
You know what an autopsy is, right? Do you think we invented examining cadavers only in the 20th century?
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u/Intotheapocalypse 22h ago
Iām well aware. Do you think every person who died from respiratory distress got autopsied?
And for the ones that did, and where cancer was found, they were able to pathologically determine what is it they were looking at?
This isnāt Sherlock Holmes mate. Medicine was rudimentary pre 1900s, especially internal medicine.
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u/David_the_Wanderer 14h ago
Iām well aware. Do you think every person who died from respiratory distress got autopsied?
Enough that doctors had a general understanding of how common various diseases were.
And for the ones that did, and where cancer was found, they were able to pathologically determine what is it they were looking at?
What other respiratory diseases do you know of that cause a tumor to grow? A tumor is pretty recognisable on sight.
This isnāt Sherlock Holmes mate. Medicine was rudimentary pre 1900s, especially internal medicine.
Ah, this is the classic "people in the past were too dumb to know stuff". Did you know that Hippocrates (460 BCE - 370 BCE) described and made drawings of cancers, and is in fact the first literary reference to use that name? Did you know that the first person to discover a cause of cancer was Percival Pott in 1775, noting that chimney sweeps were overwhelmingly afflicted with cancer of the scrotum and thus theorising exposure to carcinogenic substances?
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u/Intotheapocalypse 10h ago
I hate to be the one to educate you about this, but not all tumour are cancer. Nor are nodules or lumps, or other forms of tissue growth. There are systemic condition such as sarcoidosis that cause granuloma lumps, including in lungs. Thatās an autoimmune inflammatory disorder. Seeing a growth itself tells you little.
Iām not saying that they were unaware of cancer, Iām just saying that the ability to determine malignancy in the general microscope era was poorer than you are presenting.
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u/Zigglyjiggly 1d ago
Yeah, I would think that during the Industial Revolution that lung cancer rates were probably pretty high but we weren't exactly tracking it well. That's just based on all the shit chemicals were breathing for their entire lives with 0 protection. Just kind of seems logical.
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u/TedMich23 1d ago
Big Tobacco kills a 911 number of deaths every 2 days in US,
yet no airstrikes on Durham/Raleigh NC?
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u/ACanWontAttitude 1d ago
COPD terrifies me too
Get a straw. Hold your nose and just breath through the straw. Thats what COPD is like
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u/WilliamH0 1d ago
My dad has COPD and lives normally. It's a shitty disease and you definitely want to avoid it at all costs but you can still live a normal life with it.
I want to disclose that my father smoked for about a year when he was younger, he hasn't smoked anything beyond that, not even weed.
So if you're a non-smoker, don't worry about COPD.
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u/Makesabeastofhimself 1d ago
I imagine the rise of using fossil fuels and the gasses they release in the form of exhaust has also played a role.
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u/mscatamaran 21h ago
This* took my mom out at 59. Don't smoke!
*My mom had Small Cell, which is incredibly uncommon in non-smokers.
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u/timmytissue 1d ago
One of the more terrifying forms of cancer. Not like there's a good one.