And was smoking as popular in the past as movies/TV portray?
Not a historian, but I work in advertising and studied cigarette ads as part of my senior thesis in college. To answer the second part of your question, yes, it was really popular. Cigarettes really started to gain in popularity with World War I and World War II. They advertised cigs to soldiers, saying it would help with the psychological hardships of war, plus they were more convenient to carry and smoke in the field than cigars. By World War II, cigarettes were included in soldier rations, so most soldiers smoked. Cigarettes naturally came to be associated with masculinity, and it was considered a very non-womanly thing to do.
After World War I though, of course, the women's rights movement really geared up. A masterful ad/PR campaign by the American Tobacco Company in the '20s harnessed that movement to increase sales of cigarettes. They called cigarettes "Torches of Freedom" and staged PR events with feminist activists to make smoking seem like the rebellious and pro-equality thing to do. So, flappers would smoke and then cigarettes came to be associated with youth and rebellion, just in time for the movie industry boom to perpetuate the cool-factor of cigs.
There are a ton of really interesting details, but TL;DR is that sociological and psychological reasons for smoking led to cigarette popularity more than any perceived physical benefit.
It's been about 10 years since I wrote that paper and I don't have my sources on hand, but a quick Google search yielded plenty of sources to back me up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_in_the_United_States_military http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/health/20essay.html?_r=0
Because I was curious, I just looked up the peak of cigarette usage in the US. Looks like it was in 1965 -- 33.3% for women and 42% of the overall population.
To clarify, the Western world has been conscious of the fact that cigarettes are "bad for you" since basically their introduction. King James of England wrote about the negative health effects of smoking tobacco in 1604 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco). The major revelations of the twentieth century in regards to adverse health affects of smoking were the facts that smoking causes cancer and that second hand smoke can pose a danger to non-smokers.
I think this is a really good question: there were many reasons to smoke.
Luckies had an ad that women could "'stay slim, since they could “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.'". Luckies were additionally offered as a means to soothe throat irritation (although I maybe confusing the message they are sending). Old Gold also had a [similar message](http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=fm_st171.php&token1=fm_img5109.php&theme_file=fm_mt003.php&theme_name=For Your Health&subtheme_name=Treat Not a Treatment).
Here is a whole slew of ads put out by Camel claiming that their brand [aided in digestion](http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=fm_st059.php&token1=fm_img1349.php&theme_file=fm_mt003.php&theme_name=For Your Health&subtheme_name=For Digestion Sake).
Additionally, refer to this slogans page for common reasons people were told to smoke. You'll see many of the same themes above as well as cigarettes being a means to calm nerves or unwind after a long day.
Sources:
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Not sure tobacco was ever not considered unhealthy; after all, it takes a considerable effort just to learn how to use it without retching or choking. But for reference, this little ditty was published in "Froth", the campus humor magazine of Penn State, in November of 1915 by Graham Hemminger-- who went on to become a fabled advertising executive for the tobacco industry.
Tobacco is a dirty weed,
I like it.
It fills no useful earthy need.
I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean,
It's the worst damned stuff I've ever seen...
I like it.
Many old beliefs about the health benefits of tobacco can be traced to the medieval belief in the four humours and four elements (yellow bile/fire = hot/dry, black bile/earth = cold/dry, blood/air = hot/wet, phlegm/water = cold/wet) whose unbalance were supposedly responsible for illness.
Prescientific treatments for disease were based on the concept of restoring the balance of these humours by applying "opposite" remedies. This is why leeches were used to remove blood from patients who had illnesses that were considered to be of a "hot and wet" character.
Illnesses that cause the production of pleghm, mucus, and sputum (such as asthma and other respiratory ailments) were considered "cold and wet," so tobacco smoking was prescribed to a) rid the body of its excess phlegm by inducing coughing and b) to introduce a "hot and dry" elemental into the patient to counteract the "cold and wet" elemental that supposedly caused the ailment.
The prescription of tobacco for chest ailments lingered on long after belief in Humorism died, because if nothing else smoking does encourage a productive cough to relieve chest congestion.
Here's an respectable source about the usage of tobacco and other combustible inhalants as a treatment for asthma.
Five years earlier, a more idiosyncratic and more passionate defence of herbal cigarettes had been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Cubeb cigarettes, containing cubeb or tailed pepper, stramonium, eucalyptus and other plant extracts, had been marketed for asthma, hay fever, and catarrh since the mid-nineteenth century: indeed, Marshall’s, Blosser’s and Dr Perrin’s cubeb cigarettes remained popular herbal brands well into the late twentieth century. According to Virginia S Edwards, a doctor from Ohio who smoked cubeb cigarettes herself, such products deserved to retain a critical place in the modern treatment of respiratory disorders. “It is also my belief that the cubeb cigarette existed even prior to the tobacco cigarette as a formal product, and was, as now, sold as a medicinal item, advertised for bronchial asthma, hay fever, and colds, or just ‘across the counter’ as an ordinary cigarette.” “Several local drugstores”, she concluded, “stock these cigarettes for me and my patients. ‘Light up and live’.”94
It's a fascinating and readable paper although it's need to imply (without outright stating) any actual clinical benefit for inhalants is at times amusing. Opium and Marijuana, for instance, are dismissed entirely as "toxic." As compared to what? Until fairly recently (a decade or so) salbutamol inhalers used freon as a propellent.
Let's also remember that for asthmatics prior to the development of effective treatments, the eventual risk of lung cancer was balanced against the certainty of misery and the very real possibility of death, so anything that worked at all, even with fairly severe side effects would become "fashionable."
Nicotine is a psychoactive drug and has many benefits. We learned that cigarettes are just a really bad way of getting it into your system (albeit fast).
