The history of the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer illustrates the fallacy of associating health with the delivery of medicine.

The lung-cancer epidemic can be said to have sprung from the 1881 invention of a cigarette-making machine. Prior to that, commercial manufacturing of cigarettes was, Meyer says, a cottage industry. But by 1888 North Carolina's James Duke (whose fortune endowed the university) was selling nearly a billion cigarettes annually.