Not that many people ever did think that smoking wasn’t bad for you. My old man used to tell me that back when he was a kid in the 1940’s people used to refer to them as “coffin nails”.
All the modern emphasis on “education” misses the point that obfuscation from tobacco companies and tobacco farmers has never really fooled anybody. The fact that cigarettes are killers has been common knowledge since long before the Surgeon General got involved.
When I was a teenager, most people in our crowd smoked. We all knew that cigarettes were bad for you, caused cancer, etc. But we also “knew” that if you quit, you would be restored to pristine condition, as if you never smoked. All you had to do was quit before you got cancer, and you won!
Which, of course, is not true. Obviously quitting smoking greatly improves your odds, but having smoked, your risk will continue to be far greater than if you had never smoked. I don’t know if this was just our own urban legend, or if it was based on junk science, or what. But that was a common belief. "I’ll just smoke for a while, then quit. No harm done!’
There are a couple dimensions to the answer.
There was some opposition to smoking from the beginning, but there were also plenty who thought the benefits outweighed the costs. People in the 1600’s didn’t live as we do now, so long-term health risks meant less.
Later, the American tobacco industry did a superbly monstrous job of manipulating the public debate on the risks of smoking. As mentioned upthread, using doctors in their ads and the like. When the government weighed in on the public health issue, the industry beefed up their manipulations.
Until fairly recently, there were still holdouts who had taken sides in what amounted to a tribal war. One smoker friend of mine in the mid-1990’s bought Joe Camel merchandise (and he didn’t smoke Camels) in an apparent attempt to convince people (and maybe himself) that the character wasn’t designed to attract children to smoking.
Bottom line: addictive drugs make people behave irrationally.
Correction to the above:
I don’t understand how being bled was good for whatever ailed you
The positive implications of fatness were only considered true up to a point. There’s one piece of Shakespeare’s writing where the speaker is talking about how he loves this woman in spite of her rather unattractive form, and I think she’s described as being flabby and gross. Also, in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, someone laments how his wife is “losing her shape, and losing it fast.” I’m not sure what time period you’re referring to, but in general, although there are lots of very curvy women and large men depicted in art over the centuries, they aren’t really obese. Also, come to think of it, men are nearly always idealized as being muscular.
Unhealthy air, according to the miasmatic theory of disease. This has some validity, if perhaps for the wrong reasons, as unhealthy environments do often smell worse than a nice meadow.
That has limited but genuine useful applications as well.
Things were cooked over open fire, & in wood stoves.
Smoky.
Cities were coal-powered–very smoky.
The connect would be easy to miss.
Yep.
Up until pretty recently, it was considered good for babies to be pretty chubby. Right up through the 50s, AFAIK. A fat baby was a healthy baby. I eventually figured out why (read it somewhere)–back when babies got sick with serious illnesses a lot more often, fat was a reserve for them. Your fat baby has a better chance of surviving days of being unable to keep anything down/diarrhea/fever than your skinny baby does. Now that we have vaccines and babies hardly ever get diphtheria or whatever, that no longer applies.