As crazy and counter-productive as this seems, it is true that hospital patients could buy packs of cigarettes from their hospital beds. They could even smoke them in their hospital rooms! Before the surgeon general’s warning linking tobacco smoking to cancer, heart disease, and a host of other ailments, the medical field didn’t regard smoking as a threat to health. On the contrary, they noted that smoking helps to calm a stressed person and curbs appetites, so they considered cigarette smoking to be a good thing.