Late in October 1926, a poor man from Bucamaranga, Colombia, wrote a letter to the richest man in the world. Juan de la Rosa Quintero Parra informed John D Rockefeller that his ten-year-old son, José Vicente, had “died suddenly as a result of a purge administered by the Bureau of Uncinariasis”, the local incarnation of the Rockefeller Foundation's global project to eradicate hookworm disease. The death of the boy, who worked full-time as a streetsweeper for the municipality, had been “a serious blow since he was the only one who contributed to the support of the family consisting of seven young children”. Having heard of Mr Rockefeller's generosity, Quintero appealed to him for assistance, thanked him in advance for the attention he would give to the matter, and hoped that Divine Providence would spare the great philanthropist's life for many years to come. He mailed the letter to Rockefeller Foundation headquarters at 61 Broadway in New York City, the same address where, probably unbeknownst to him, bits of his son's organs had been sent following a post-mortem. Quintero Parra's letter came to the attention of either the 84-year-old patriarch or his son, John D Rockefeller, Jr, the Foundation's president. Their executive secretary, F M Read was instructed to make inquiries into the death of the child, José Vicente Quintero.

On the evening of Saturday 31 August 1901, the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust wrote to his mother with characteristic intimacy, recounting his struggle to quell a severe attack of asthma the previous day. Having suffered from periodic attacks of asthma since the age of nine, Proust was familiar with the range of contemporary treatments for the condition: over the years, he had been prescribed opium, caffeine, iodine, and morphine (which had once been injected by his father, Dr Adrien Proust), his nose had been cauterized numerous times, he had adopted a milk diet, and he had occasionally attempted to relieve both his asthma and his hay fever by visiting health resorts, such as Evian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva. However, as his note to his mother suggests, Proust's favoured remedy involved the inhalation of smoke from anti-asthma cigarettes or powders: