author
A. (Alvan) McAllister
An early American physician, he is remembered for a striking 19th-century attack on tobacco at a time when many people still treated the habit lightly. His best-known work blends medical argument, moral concern, and public-health warning in a way that feels surprisingly modern.
1 Audiobook
A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco
by A. (Alvan) McAllister
About the author
A. (Alvan) McAllister is known chiefly for A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco, a medical work connected to the Medical Society of the County of Oneida. The piece was originally read before that society on January 5, 1830, and later published in Boston in an enlarged edition in 1832.
The book presents McAllister as a physician deeply concerned about the health effects of habitual tobacco use. Long before anti-smoking campaigns became common, he argued that tobacco damaged the body and that the habit was being spread and normalized even by medical example.
Very little reliably confirmed biographical information about McAllister appears to be readily available online beyond his authorship of this work and his identification as an M.D. Because of that, his writing stands as the clearest introduction to him: a serious, early voice in the history of public-health criticism of tobacco.