Fritz Lickint

Fritz Lickint (1898 to 1960) was a German internist and social democrat who studied the health and social harm caused by alcohol and tobacco. In the 1920s he described lung cancer in smokers and the pathway of cancer along the respiratory and upper digestive tract, and in 1929 he published what was then the most thorough case-series study linking tobacco and cancer. He was among the first physicians to describe tobacco dependence as a disease that needs treatment, and he coined the term passive smoking. His political convictions cost him his post at the Chemnitz hospital in 1934, and he was conscripted as a basic aidman in 1939; after 1945 he returned to hospital work and became a hospital director. In 1939 he published Tabak und Organismus, a volume of about 1200 pages covering some 8000 publications. A German research institute for nicotine research and smoking cessation later took his name.