I thought consumption was TB.

["While consumption usually signified tuberculosis in mid-nineteenth-century texts, the term covered a multitude of physical ailments characterized by weight loss resulting in death, including cancer." (Susan Sontag in "Illness as Metaphor.") - Dave]

Interesting to note from Wikipedia that W.G. Voliva also believed that the earth was a flat disk. I think his rant against tobacco products didn't spring from any deep medical or scientific insights but rather from a patholocigal tendency to regulate other people's lives.

The connection between lung cancer and smoking was discovered around 1930, so it could be that the sign is from the thirties (Wilbur died in 1942 according to Wikipedia). Still looks like photoshopped to me. At least, I'm surprised.

[A link between smoking and cancer (or consumption, as it was called) was posited at least as far back as the 19th century. Scientific or medical evidence didn't have much to do with it. The various temperance movements active at the time claimed all kinds of deleterious effects from tobacco use. - Dave]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Glenn_Voliva

>>>I never would have thought they even had a clue about the bad effects of smoking back then..wow!

Yes, they had to just guess, with nothing more to go on than the wracking cough, shortness of breath and bloody sputum!

I looked for more information on W.G.Voliva because I had never heard of Great Lakes, Illinois. There is the Great Lakes Naval Station that opened in 1911 but this photo is probably taken in Zion, Illinois.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion,_Illinois

I've seen this before.
It's hard to tell in this copy but I believe she has a cigarette in her hand. Poking fun at the sign.

Publicly scolding other people for things you don't do is hardly a new vice.

This just blows me away!

I never would have thought they even had a clue about the bad effects of smoking back then..wow!

.

You mean tobacco products aren't good for you?

I'm sending my friend who's a smoker this link. She always says that they used to think smoking was good for ya!

[Cigarette advertising of the early 20th century did indeed tout the supposedly medicinal, healthful qualities of tobacco. - Dave]

This sounds like something my would write TODAY in 2007, nearly a hundred years after this photo was taken.