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• William Stewart: Crusader against smoking  

"Caution - Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health." By today's explicit and bloodcurdling standards the warning that appeared for the first time on cigarette packs in the United States in 1966 was quaint in its understatement. But with those words William Stewart helped turn smoking - in the West at least - from emblem of cool into, almost literally, a deadly social sin.

Stewart was Surgeon General of the United States, the country's most senior public health official, between 1965 and 1969. In recent years, under the dominance of the conservative doctrine of "small government," the post has lost much of its former importance. But in that era, as President Lyndon Johnson pushed through his groundbreaking civil rights and public health legislation, the Surgeon General was a power in the land. . . .

Today the cigarette packet health warnings he helped pioneer in the US are positively tame by international standards. Across the EU, packets proclaim that "Smoking Kills", while many countries either have already, or are about to have, packets carry pictures of body organs damaged by smoking. In America, by contrast, there are merely rotating warnings printed on the side of the packet only, and in colours that do not clash with those of the product - with no updating since 1984.

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