The former Merseyside GP Lennox Johnston, whose story is told in Christopher Snowdon's fascinating new history of anti-smoking campaigns, was in many ways a man ahead of his time.1 Following his personal researches into nicotine in the 1930s (which involved the self administration of dangerously toxic quantities), he pioneered the notion of nicotine addiction as the root of the evil of persistent smoking. In a paper published in the Lancet in 1942 he identified smoking as the cause of the upsurge of lung cancer and he always resented the primacy given to Doll and Hill's later work in this field. In a remarkable anticipation of current fashions, in 1945 he referred to a ‘pandemic of smoking’.2 …