The tobacco reliquary

CMAJ has been made aware of an error in a Humanities article in the Feb. 3, 2015, issue.1

The article includes an image of a mid-20th century pewter ashtray with the word “JAMA,” which the author believed was the acronym of the Journal of the American Medical Association. This was consistent with the fact that the journal accepted cigarette advertising until 1954, and cigarettes were given away at AMA meetings until the early 1960s.

The author recently learned from the founder of the US Military Ashtray Museum that he had misidentified the ashtray, which has been shown on the website of the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society (www.csts.ua.edu) for several years. It turns out that JAMA stands for the Japan Air Material Area, a United States Army Air Forces logistics depot that existed from 1947 to 1949.