My wife Jeanie and I, for one reason or another, got to talking the other day about smoking. How annoying and nasty the habit is, how grateful we are that neither of us ever got started on it, and how sad we feel for the people we know who smoke and are now suffering the inevitable health-consequences of a life spent smoking. That sort of thing. Then Jeanie related something that took me by surprise: her mother, Claudia, who had smoked for close to fifty years before quitting, once told Jeanie that, back in the days prior to WWII, a doctor had actually prescribed cigarettes for her husband-at-the-time—as a treatment for his asthma. The act of inhaling cigarette smoke, the doctor's reasoning apparently went, would improve her husband's breathing. Of course, we both got a good laugh out of that. (Read entire article here.)