Medicine: Cancer & Horror

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In full color, the screen showed the scalpel slicing through the patient's skin and muscle. Below the ribs was a blackish, slimy-looking blob—a cancerous lung. After a few preliminary steps, the surgeon cut it out. This was the climax of a horror movie sponsored by the American Temperance Society, affiliated with the tobacco-fighting Seventh-Day Adventists. Purpose of the movie, available to churches and civic groups: to dramatize the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Star of the film: New Orleans' famed Surgeon and Anti-Tobacco Crusader Alton Ochsner (appearing anonymously).

Viewers so far have been shaken. During the filming the lead players, the producer and cameramen gave up smoking. But professional cancer fighters, who favor frankness about cancer, but not horror, are worried that the film may do more harm than good, by frightening people away from hospitals.