You may remember her from graphic anti-smoking advertisements on TV, a woman whose voicebox was replaced years ago, urging people to stop smoking before their bodies ended up as damaged as hers. Fifty-three year old Terrie Hall died from cancer early Monday morning, FOX News reports.
Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, conducted the government campaign Hall was featured in in an effort to stop people from smoking, using disturbing and poignant footage of Hall getting dressed in the morning by putting on a wig, putting in false teeth and covering the hole in her throat with an artificial voicebox, her body ravaged from oral and throat cancer she had developed from smoking since high school.
"She was a public health hero," Dr. Frieden said to FOX News. "She may well have saved more lives than most doctors do."
Hall's first public ad in her "Tips From a Smoker" series showed the North Carolina native getting ready in the morning, and garnered more than 2.8 million views on YouTube. In another "Tips" ad, Hall advised smokers to record themselves singing their children a lullaby or reading a book to them. "I wish I had. The only voice my grandson's ever heard is this one," she said in her guttural, electric voice.
Hall was first diagnosed with oral cancer in 2001 at the age of 40, and continued smoking through her radiation treatments. Later that year, she was diagnosed with throat cancer before she finally quit. Since then, Hall became an advocate for anti-smoking, speaking to schools and community groups across the country in an effort to get people to quit. This summer, Hall's cancer spread to her brain, and she died early Monday morning at a hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., according to the New York Daily News.
"Not everybody walks around with a hole in their neck," Hall told Fox News during an interview in July 2012. "Not everybody gets cancer. But some form, some way, somehow, tobacco can and will affect your life."
Although Hall's life ended early, her legacy lived on. On Sept. 9, the CDC published results from a study based off on Hall's ad campaign, revealing that she had encouraged more than 100,000 Americans to quit smoking.
"In sharing her story, she saved thousands of people from tobacco-related illness, disability, and death," Dr. Frieden said to FOX News. "I am reminded of the words of a former CDC director, Dr. Bill Foege, who said that public health is at its best when we see, and help others see, the faces and the lives behind the numbers."
Hall also got to meet those she inspired before she died, including a woman who approached her during her 2013 FOX News interview in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
"She put her hands out to me and she was starting to cry and she said, 'I quit smoking because of you,'" Hall said at the time. "Of course, I started crying and had cold chills. It was pretty powerful."
