Cartoonists take up smoking
and
Seeing patients: The sketchiest details
Alan Blum

Part One: A family physician and medical activist, Alan Blum retraces the modern history of anti-smoking advocacy as seen through the eyes of newspaper editorial cartoonists. These trenchant works of art have mocked politicians, publishers, and even physicians for being in cahoots with the tobacco industry, but they have also made fun of sanctimonious anti-smoking zealots.
Part Two: As a medical student, Dr. Blum began sketching his patients on prescription pads and jotting down snippets of their stories. Culled from more than 5,000 such artworks, this presentation pays tribute to the patients he has been privileged to know.

Dr. Blum is an authority on the tobacco industry. In 1977, he founded Doctors Ought to Care (DOC), the first physicians' organization dedicated to ending the tobacco pandemic. As editor of the Medical Journal of Australia and the New York State Journal of Medicine in the 1980s, he published the first theme issues on smoking at any journal.