This is certainly turning out to be quite the year for 50th anniversaries. Fifty years ago next month, the Beatles made their U.S. debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson started the War on Poverty. And 50 years ago Saturday, the surgeon general of the United States issued the single most important report that would ever come out of that office. It linked cigarette smoking to illness and death.

It’s hard to remember now just how prevalent smoking used to be. In the mid-1960s, around half the men in the country smoked; for women, the number was 35 percent. People smoked in their offices, smoked in restaurants, smoked on airplanes. Indeed, Paul Billings of the American Lung Association recalls that the airlines often gave passengers small packets of cigarettes when they boarded the plane.

But by the 1950s, scientists were beginning to equate cigarettes with lung cancer and other fatal diseases, a linkage the tobacco industry vehemently denied. In 1962, the prestigious Royal College of Physicians in Britain issued a report connecting smoking and lung cancer. After seeing that report, Dr. Luther Terry, who was then the surgeon general, put together an advisory board and asked it to report back to him on the potential dangers of cigarettes.

Did it ever: the advisory board’s subsequent report not only linked smoking to lung cancer but also to emphysema and cardiovascular disease. It labeled cigarettes a health hazard. “In general,” it concluded, “the greater the number of cigarettes smoked daily, the higher the death rate.”