Howard Engle
American pediatrician (1919–2009)
Howard Aaron Engle (September 11, 1919 – July 22, 2009) was an American pediatrician and lifelong smoker who was one of the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit filed against the tobacco industry, in which Engle claimed that he smoked multiple packs of cigarettes daily since he was in college and was unable to quit despite multiple attempts even after contracting emphysema, continuing to smoke until his death.
Early life and education
Engle was born on September 11, 1919, in the Milwaukee suburb of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, where his parents ran a farm, and he was part of the area's only Jewish family. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and received his medical training at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. He served in a public health role in Allied-occupied Germany while serving in the United States Army in the aftermath of World War II.
He moved to Miami Beach, Florida after completing his military service and established a medical practice specializing in pediatric neurology. Using his own experiences as a cautionary tale, he would emphasize the risks of smoking to his patients. Engle opened an office in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami and ran an integrated office in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era. In the 1960s, he was chief of pediatrics at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.
Smoking class action suit
A class action suit claiming that the members of the class had been injured by their cigarette usage was filed in May 1994, representing an estimated 100,000 smokers who were said to have been turned into nicotine addicts by a tobacco industry that did not warn them of the risks of the habit. The class was certified in October 1994 in Dade County Circuit Court in Miami, Florida,
and an appeals court decided in January 1996 that the class action could go forward, though only Florida smokers could be included. The case was filed by the husband-and-wife legal team of Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt on behalf of seven Florida smokers, with Engle as lead plaintiff, and went to trial in 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Howard Engle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.