Pediatrician led anti-tobacco lawsuit
Dr. Howard A. Engle, the veteran Miami Beach pediatrician who lent his name to a landmark class action suit against Big Tobacco, died Wednesday at home, said son David Engle. He was 89 and suffered from smoking-related respiratory disease and lymphoma.
He had been in hospice care since last fall — when he finally quit smoking.
Decades before he signed on as lead plaintiff in what became known as the “sick smokers of Florida” suit, Engle was an institution in Miami Beach, where he treated multiple generations of many families before retiring from private practice in 1997.
He was also revered in Miami’s black community for refusing to segregate his practice in the pre-civil rights era and for opening an office in Liberty City.
Famously gruff and forthright, Engle was nonetheless single-mindedly dedicated to his young patients.
“He treated all his patients as if they were his own kids,” son David said. “He’d stay up all night with a sick kid who was thought to be hopeless.”
Anyone who knew Howard Engle understood that he cared far more about his role as a doctor than as a litigant — even though Engle, et al. v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., et al, marked a seismic shift in the legal battle against a once-invincible industry.
In 1994, Miami personal-injury lawyers Susan and Stanley Rosenblatt filed the class action lawsuit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. They asked Engle — who had treated eight of their nine children — to represent some 700,000 Florida smokers.
They knew he had been tobacco-addicted since the cigarette companies gave University of Wisconsin medical students like him free smokes in the early 1940s, that he had been unable to quit and that he loathed Big Tobacco’s strategies to hook youngsters.
The Engle case was the first smokers’ class action to come to trial in a U.S. court. A Miami-Dade jury, after hearing 157 witnesses in two years, decided that the industry had intentionally misled smokers about cigarettes’ dangers and awarded a record-breaking $145 billion in damages.
The case went twice to the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami, which initially upheld, then overturned the smokers’ class certification, nullifying the award.
In 2006, Florida’s Supreme Court declined to reinstate the award but let stand the finding on industry deception.
That relieved potential plaintiffs of a significant burden: reestablishing disease causation anew in every case.
Last February, in the first of 8,000 individual cases, a Broward County jury ruled that Philip Morris USA owed $8 million to the family of Cooper City locksmith Stuart Hess. The 40-year chain smoker died in 1997 of lung cancer at 55.
The company is appealing.
Howard Engle made many attempts to quit smoking — and none to hide his habit.
“Goddammit! I’m an addict!” he growled to a Herald reporter in 2006, lighting a Marlboro Medium as he gasped and coughed. Wrapped in a kimono, he sat in his Venetian Islands living room surrounded by his artist wife’s paintings and his collection of antique Samurai swords.
“When you went into the office, you knew he smoked,” said nurse Betty Hepburn, who worked 30 years for Engle at Children’s Medical Group, 975 41st St.
A pediatric neurologist, Engle was involved with United Cerebral Palsy telethons and treated disabled children referred by social-service agencies gratis.
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