Tobacco and the Human Body (1954/old educational film on tobacco's ill effects/HD 1080p)
Channel: Charles Chadwick
Date: 09/05/2014

Tobacco and the Human Body, made by Encyclopedia Britannica films, is an early educational film on the physiological effects of smoking. While seeming more or less accurate on tobacco's effects on the human body, specifically the lungs, and its effects on the heart, circulation, and the lower extremities, it remains fairly noncommittal on whether tobacco is actually cancerous, or really causes any health problems whatsoever. Whether this is due to a lack of evidence at the time, or a simple attempt at impartiality, is unknown. If anything, its evidence that at the time, the conditions for truly understanding tobacco's ill health effects existed in an environment of public acceptance of smoking's mundanity, the tobacco industry's interest in having its product be benign and popular pr wise, and the precariousness of Science in between the two, especially since I'd guess that a good portion of tobacco research was industry funded, and some of that research may have filtered into this film. This is not a true HD transfer of this film, but rather an HD capture of an SD playback of the film, with hopefully a more faithful rendition of the film's regular video playback. If there are any filmmaker's interested in a true HD transfer of the film, I believe you can contact Skip Eisenheimer at avgeeks.com and pay a licensing fee for a better copy. It should be in his collection. An mpeg2 SD version of this is also available at archive.org.