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For the first 15 years of her working life, Beulah Bewley had what she described as a "zig zag career." 1 She did some paediatrics, some psychiatry, and some family planning, as, like so many professional women of her time, her career was subordinate to that of her husband and the bringing up of her five children.
However, in 1969, after seeing an advertisement in The BMJ for a new MSc in social medicine and epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), she decided to go back into education. Bewley was 40 and the only woman among 11 younger men, with whom, at the beginning, she felt she had to "catch up."
Smoking study
In her second year Bewley studied smoking among primary school children in Lambeth, and this, after she graduated, led to a five year study looking at smoking rates among secondary school children in Derbyshire and Kent. Children and their parents would fill in questionnaires about their smoking with space to write comments: one mother said it was impossible to stop her child smoking because she ran a pub.
Bewley and her fellow researchers found that 6% of boys and 2.5% of girls were smoking one or more cigarettes a week, with children more likely to smoke if their parents smoked. 2 A smaller study of 300 children found that 11% of those who smoked were given their first cigarette by one of their parents. 3
A paper on academic performance and social factors found that children who smoked...