Snuff was first used by Native Americans and its use spread to Europeans and then to the rest of the world. Its primary purpose was always as a nicotine-delivery system. Among users, sneezing is regarded as the mark of a beginner.
Besides, everyone knows that it’s a myth that sneezariums were places where people congregated to sneeze. They’re actually convalescent homes, and the name is derived from a corruption of the latin senescere, to grow tired or old.
This is very interesting, etymologically speaking.
While many of the rich could afford to convalesce in various sneezariums of their day—keeping their exposure to snuff at a minimum, if not an all out abstinence for a time—it was largely out of reach for the poor; who in great number would indulge because of snuff’s relative cheapness. In the latter part of the 19th century, sneezariums did come into great fashion for those with the proper endowment from the elderly & posh.
However, the hoi polloi of their day, were mostly found squirming in old churches, and squatting in abandon buildings as they suffered out their insufferable and terminal “sneezonoma”. The officials wouldn’t bother with mass graves, and would usually burn the bodies of those that succumbed to this horrible fate.
And this is in agreement with the research of both Woodson and Carmichael.
Actually there was an early form of online tobacco ordering in 18th Century London. Keen smokers unwilling to leave the confines of their parlours had a form of semaphore which, when a small lever was pulled, raise a signal flag on the roof to let the tobacconist know that more supplies were needed. Tobacco being known colloquially as “bush” {akin to today’s slang term “weed” for marijuana} the phrase. ''bush telegraph" was born.
He first attempted it while traveling from Winston-Salem to Newport on his camel. He had stopped at the GPC center on a lark to get a good vantage point of the viceroy’s arrival at Pall Mall when he was accosted by some players from Kent who went maverick on him for stealing their chesterfield. He had a lucky strike and escaped with only basic injuries due to the intervention of a natural American spirit, who left him seeing seven stars and a vision of a new technique to try at the next Parliament meeting. This is a true story - I heard it from some guy in Bel Air.
Listen, I don’t have the time to get into a debate/cite war over this, and I certainly take their research over the matter with a grain of salt. But surely you can’t deny the eyewitness accounts of the time by Hodgeson, Greye or even Vanderbilt?
Sniffing snuff, as I learned to call it, is still pretty popular in some areas. I know several cigar shops that carry fairly extensive (pardon the word choice) lines of the stuff. I’ve talked with some of the users and they say the experience is more a masking odors thing than a tobacco rush thing.
I hate to be pedantic, but it’s from the root senesco. This is cited in most of the popular books on the topic, if you bothered to look.
An interesting fact, one of the first recorded smoking bans actually had to do with the burning of these bodies, as the amount of nicotine in them would pollute the air and irritate the townsfolk. These were the origins of modern smoking bans, or corpus ardens laws.
That’s just an urban legend. No credible reports of any of these so-called “sneeze films” has ever surfaced. Obviously, any such film would be seized by the police as evidence for a serious assault-and-boogery investigation.
I tried snuff/snus while in Iceland recently. According to this article 10% of males aged 18-44 in Iceland use snuff. In my experience, it was definitely being used as a nicotine delivery system. I don’t recall sneezing.
