In his Sketches, New and Old, published in 1875, Mark Twain attacked someone he called ‘the moral statistician’ for ‘always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes …in the fatal practice of smoking’, while at the same time being ‘blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time’.
