The Greatest Generation

The Greatest Generation

For 41 years Lester Sontag, MD was the director of the Fels Research Institute concerned with human growth and development.

I moved to Yellow Springs the year he retired and soon after I purchased a home on the land that is identified by the name of the "Sontag Plat" on the county property rolls.  For the next fifteen years Dr. Sontag and I  shared a backyard and many cups of coffee.  He became my patient, my mentor and my friend.

While Lester was widely recognized, and universally lauded, for his achievements at the Fels Research Institute, I marveled at his amazing prescience in identifying tobacco smoking as a potential threat to health three decades before the US Surgeon General issued the first health warning about smoking in 1964! 

Dr. Sontag's research in World War II was concerned with the effects of wartime stress upon babies while in the womb.  Meanwhile, the popular press was filled with advertisements touting smoking as an "ideal way to lose weight" and "soothing on the "T Zone" (the throat).  In 1954 Tobacco was even included in the US AID "Food for Peace Program".

Dr. Sontag's research and inspiring independence of mind were not to be fully appreciated until later.  However, Yellow Springs was enriched by the presence, in our midst, of a true representative of the "Greatest Generation".

In the march 1935 issue of Time Magazine, his work was noted in the following article.

Unborn Smokers

Monday, Feb. 18, 1935

Physiologists agree that smoking does no more harm to a woman than to a man, if harm there be. According to many investigators, the only circumstances under which a woman should not smoke are while she has anesthetic gas in her lungs (she might explode), and while she produces milk for her baby. Milk drains from the blood of a smoking mother those smoke ingredients which please her, but may not agree with her nursling.

Might smoking disagree with a baby before it was born? asked Antioch College's Drs. Lester Warren Sontag and Robert F. Wallace. While pregnant women who had smoked for years and one who never before had smoked, puffed cigarettes, the Antioch doctors held stethoscopes to the mothers' abdomens, listened to the beatings of the baby hearts. Smoking promptly sent the fetal heart beats up from 144 to 149 beats a minute. This made the Antioch doctors conclude: "It is not improbable that maternal smoking during pregnancy may have permanently harmful effects upon the child."

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[Dr. Russell]

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