Commentary: Smoking and Lung Cancer: A Historical Perspective.

Smoking and Lung Cancer (1959) is a compelling case study of the nature of proof and causation in medicine. It should be understood as the culmination of years of work to find rigorous methods for making statistically and rhetorically convincing accounts of how associations might be deemed to be causal. In this comment, we highlight several papers written during the 1950s by Jerome Cornfield that illustrate the role he played in laying the groundwork for this important and influential work.