Smoking as a family edition
The millions of fathers who have died from heart disease, emphysema and lung cancer due to smoking was the focus of a new online exhibit in June, “Like Father, Like Son: Smoking as a Family Tradition.”
The exhibition is the work of The University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society and its director, Dr. Alan Blum, the Gerald Leon Wallace, MD, Endowed Chair in Family Medicine for the College of Community Health Sciences. Father’s Day was June 18.
The exhibition is dedicated to the late Wallace, who along with his wife Celia, provided a generous gift to endow the chair that Blum holds. The exhibition is also dedicated to Blum’s late father, Leon Blum, a smoker who suffered a heart attack in 1953 at the age of 44 and died at age 60. Leon Wallace, who smoked cigars, died from lung cancer.
The exhibition features postcards, advertisements and videos that highlight the health risks of smoking and “recalls an era not very long ago when a son giving his dad a gift of a carton of cigarettes was as American as apple pie.” To learn more about the Father’s Day exhibition, click here.