Madam, – I think it must be questionable whether Mary Mulvihill is correct to attribute Thomas Harriot’s death in 1621 to smoking: “tobacco . . . would later be the death of him . . . He died of a tumour of the nose brought on by smoking tobacco, probably the first European to die of a smoking-related cancer” (“Scientist with Irish link beat Galileo to the moon”, March 19th).
An 1880 biography of Harriot in my possession gives a different version of events, which in all the circumstances seems to me more credible: “He died. . .after having suffered much from a cancer in the lip, occasioned it is supposed by a habit he had contracted of holding in his mouth instruments of brass often charged with verdigris”.
Can anyone judge with greater certainty between these two explanations? – Yours, etc,