Knowing that smoking is a big deal when it comes to post-surgical outcomes and general wound healing, and that this presumably wasn't known at the time when most people smoked, it seems that you would have a whole generation of noticeably slower healers than today's, even when controlling for the better medicine and surgical procedures.
E.g, when grandpa got a cut on his finger, it would just generally heal slower and worse than it would today, and it would have been considered the normal outcome since everybody smoked.
Seems like you'd notice a small but noticeable increase in mortality just from that factor. Is there data on this?



