Butt Out for Baby was a smoking cessation intervention guide, aimed at community health workers, that the Child and Youth Health group published in 2003. The literature was released as the chief publication of the Butt Out for Baby Project, a multiple-resource smoking cessation program directed toward young parents and pregnant smokers, following the revelation of a relatively high rate of smoking among that group. The authors published the pamphlet in Adelaide, South Australia, and did not credit themselves individually. Gill Faulkner, the manager for Butt Out for Baby Project, developed Butt Out for Baby in partnership with young South Australian parents and pregnant women, who contributed significantly to its communicative style and recommended approaches. Targeting behavioral counsellors, Butt Out for Baby represented a model publication in the majorly successful South Australian smoking cessation campaign, which reached thousands of young parents and pregnant women to contribute to a significant decrease in youth smokers over the subsequent decade.

Richard Doll was an epidemiologist and public figure in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Working primarily at the University of Oxford, in Oxford, England, Doll established a definitive correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Furthermore, Doll’s work helped legitimize epidemiology as a scientific discipline. Doll’s research also helped establish modern guidelines for oncological studies, as well as for contemporary and future research on the effect of smoking on pregnancy and fetal development. In addition to studying the health effects of smoking, Doll also studied cervical cancer and contraceptives.

From 1951 to 2001, researchers at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, conducted the British Doctors’ Study, a study that examined the smoking habits, disease rates, and mortality rates of physicians in Britain. Two epidemiologists, scientists who study occurrence and distribution of disease, Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill, initiated the study, and statistician Richard Peto joined the team in 1971. The objective of the study was to assess the risks associated with tobacco use, and its relationship to lung cancer. The researchers tracked 34,439 male doctors practicing in Britain, and recorded smoking habits, development of diseases including lung cancer, other cancers, respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and mortality rates. The researchers published updated results every ten years. In 1980, Doll and other researchers concluded a related study on the smoking habits and disease rates of female doctors practicing in Britain. The results of both studies provided evidence that individuals who smoked tobacco were more likely to develop chronic respiratory illnesses, including lung cancer, and cardiovascular diseases.