Article Text

Download PDFPDF

Holy smoke!
Free

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Some years ago, a British physician visiting a hospital in southern Africa found a heavy smoking patient making hand rolled cigarettes from the pages of old copies of medical journals thrown out by the hospital library. The lightweight paper ofThe New England Journal of Medicine was his preferred choice, apparently, though The Lancet came a close second. Now we hear a similar tale, this time involving a Christian missionary who, on arrival at his new parish in the same part of the world, was delighted to find many people stopping him and, unprompted, asking whether he could get them a copy of the Holy Bible. And yes, it was with regret that a more experienced colleague took him aside to explain that the bibles sent out by missionary societies in the UK were highly rated by some of the local men for the ultra fine paper of their pages.