A history of the medicinal use of tobacco 1492-1860.

THE history of the medicinal use of tobacco before the Civil War has apparently not been documented in a single piece of writing. Yet, a review of publications on the subject shows that this plant was long used as orthodox medicine by the members of the medical profession. It seems to me to be a useful endeavour, therefore, to give the medico-historical account of tobacco, since: (1) Tobacco is an American plant, the Indians having presented it to the rest of the world; (2) According to Webster tobacco is America's most famous plant; (3) Tobacco is probably the only plant which was ever used as the panacea of panaceas; (4) Tobacco is now, and has been throughout history, an important product of the State of Maryland; (5) Tobacco was considered to have been one of the God-sent remedies; (6) Tobacco is a subject for controversy at present over the use of the cigarette for pleasure. The hypothesis of medical men that there existed a panacea of panaceas prompted an age-long search for such a remedy. When Western European explorers of America discovered the tobacco plant, this hypothesis was one of the reasons that prompted the European medical men to seize upon the use of tobacco as medicine and subsequently to persuade themselves that tobacco was the long-sought panacea. Their later experiments with the plant as medicine confirmed the hypothesis of the physicians to their own satisfaction over a long period of years. Very early, it was noted that tobacco had a habit-forming quality, and yet as the years passed the habit theory did not seem fully to explain the hold that tobacco medicine had upon its users. Eventually it came to be recognized that tobacco had an addictive property. The following account of Dr. Sigmund Freud's experience is related to show the reasoning of a distinguished doctor of medicine as he made the distinction between habit and addiction. In 1894, Dr. Sigmund Freud at the age of thirty-eight suffered an irregular disturbance of his heart beat (arrhythmia) which Dr. Wilhelm Fleiss informed him was due to smoking-Dr. Freud was then smoking twenty cigars a day. Dr. Fleiss ordered Freud to stop smoking, and from time to time he reduced the number of cigars or stopped smoking them altogether, only to resume his full daily allowance of twenty. When at the age of sixty-seven it was discovered that Freud had cancer, …