Medical aspects of tobacco smoking and the anti-tobacco movement in Britain in the nineteenth century.

IN THE sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries extravagant notions had been held of tobacco as the Herba Panacea, Heilkraut, and Herbe propre 'a tous maux. In the course of time these had waned and tobacco had come to be consumed more often for pleasure than for health, but about 1800 tobacco was still being used as a remedy for many ills. "Tobacco is narcotic, sedative, emetic, diuretic, cathartic, and errhine, whether it be taken into the stomach or applied externally", said James Jennings in 1830.1 Tobacco smoking was recommended as an antispasmodic for asthma and a clyster or enema of infused tobacco was employed for intestinal obstruction, strangulated hernia, and strychnine poisoning, and as a diuretic for dropsy, dysury, and ischuria. In the cholera epidemic of 1832 tobacco was injected in the vain hope of alleviating the violent purges caused by that disease.3 However, following the isolation of the nicotine content of tobacco in 1828 and the demonstration of its poisonous qualities, doctors became wary of administering so dangerous a drug. In 1863 the British Medical Journal spoke of twenty-five years' past disuse of the tobacco enema on account of its uncertain action and sometimes fatal results.4 The revision of Pereira's Materia Medica published in 1872 in expressing the same view stated that because of the widespread use of anaesthesia surgical operation for hernia was no longer dreaded.5 At Nottingham, said Dr. John Higginbottom in 1861, the prescription of tobacco for any ailment was rare.' Even as an antispasmodic for asthma where tobacco could be administered in the less dangerous mode of-smoking, it was going out of favour.7 In 1958 H. Silvette, P. S. Larson, and H. B. Haag published a com-