OP, do you realize:
The smoke in the houses probably kept down the population of lice, rodents, and fleas on rodents, as well as some other bugs; aside from the fact that they can bits you and cause itchy rashes, that can become infected when you scratch them (especially with unwashed, Medieval hands), they could transmit disease by transmitting bacteria. So there may have been a net gain from the smoke. Obviously, we have much better solutions now.
The expression I always hear in old books and such is that smoking “loosens the lungs”. I guess loose lungs were a good thing to have. There was a time when doctors would actually push their patients to smoke more; I’ve come across characters in older media feeling guilty that they’re not smoking enough. Times change.
I’m sure in 100 years - or maybe less - people will be wondering how we could have been so stupid to, say, take those 5-hour-energy things, or use nonstick frying pans, or microwave food, or use a certain lipstick that turns out to be toxic, etc, etc. All you can do is try to use things in moderation and hope you’re not doing too much damage.
Fisher was also, IIRC, a huge proponent of eugenics. Nobody’s perfect, I suppose . . .
If I remember the history correctly* Tobacco was brought from The New World to civilized lands around the 1600’s as a novelty item. It was introduced to explorers and adventurers by what were then called Indians. Cal Meacham’s quoted documents# seem to support this notion.
But the Native Americans weren’t using tobacco the way Europeans (and, later, the Colonists and their descendants) use it, constantly smoking day after day like a perpetual chimney. In Black Elk Speaks the author tells of the males of his tribe using tobacco on rare occasions, as a hallucinogen to help facilitate the dream-walks expected as a rite of passage. That seems to me to suggest they knew it was bad for the body in some ways. Besides, a guy wouldn’t want to be --well, communities and societies wouldn’t want him to be – Dream-Walking on peyote all the time and they wouldn’t want him to be Dream-Walking on Tobacco all the time, either.
Furthermore, the relatively modern product of cigarettes is astoundingly different than the unadulterated leaf of the pre-Colombian practice. Shortly after the anonymous insider dropped the Secret Tobacco files on the Stanford Library doorstep@, various periodicals were publishing lists of the additives that Lorimar, RJ Reynolds, et al were squirting onto the dried leaves during the cigarette-making process. My friend read the list aloud to us one evening, adding comments about the additives as he went along. Most of them were known carcinogens (formaldehyde, benzene, lots of chemicals with no fewer than 8 syllables) in their normal form. It’s astounding that anyone could expect people to inhale the smoke from burning them - and pay for the privilege!
So, sure, the earliest consumers of tobacco thought it was a useful drug once in a while, but not in the form or frequency that is consumed today.
–G!
- Since, y’know, I was there at the time. But please forgive the Alzheimer-related memory loss if I’m misrepresenting the facts.
By the way, that doesn’t seem to be a law against tobacco but a proposal to tax it at 6-pence per pound of product.
@ Late 1980’s, I believe, though I may have the particular institution incorrectly specified.
I had asthma as a child. Not really bad asthma, but I had a couple of scary episodes. When I started smoking my asthma went away. And I mean, with my first cigarette (which was a menthol).
One of the barriers to quitting was, every time I got three or four days into not smoking, my asthma symptoms returned.
It isn’t just me. I’ve actually heard a couple of theories about this including one from a doctor–who, I might add, said it was still better to carry around an inhaler than to carry around and smoke cigarettes. I know quite a few other people who’ve had similar experiences, including a friend who quit smoking because of her bad asthma and, for two years, her asthma got worse (two hospitalizations including one that lasted for weeks and weeks), and then got better but not gone when she started smoking again.
Now I knew at the time that all the high school athletes were breaking training if they smoked, including the tennis team. But losing the asthma symptoms actually seemed like a net gain to me at the time. No more wheezing halfway through the first set. No more wheezing at all.
“Suffumigation”! What a word!
I love the way they wrote stuff like that in those days. :dubious: The direct ancestral language of modern-day Legalese as written even unto this very day! //old rolleyes// 
Back when I smoked, my mother said it was a “filthy habit,” but she never said it was unhealthy. Nobody did. Plus, my father and brother smoked, and if she was at a party or special occasion, even my mother had a cigaret or two.
Similarly, at least up through the early 1960’s, dermatologists recommended direct exposure to sunlight as a treatment for acne. I wonder how they feel about that these days!
Eighteen years ago, after one of my operations, the surgeon asked me if I smoked. Expecting to get jumped on I said Yes. He then told me to go downstairs (& outside) several times a day for a cigarette as the smoke stimulated the bowels and would help me heal faster.
Wasn’t it more that in times past, being fat was a sign of prosperity, that you could actually afford to eat, and not just eat enough to live another day, but eat enough to get fat. And being able to afford that, you could also afford medical care, such that it was, rather than sit around and die from a cough. And you could also afford a better home, and thus be better sheltered from the elements and possibly not even get that cough in the first place.
You can consume nicotine is various forms aside from inhaling smoke like patches, gum etc, I haven’t detected any negative effects so far, unlike cigarettes.
But hell if you have any kind of cite about nicotine being harmful, aside from large overdose of course, post it man!
Nicotine is what stimulates the bowels, but at the time cigs might have been the only source.
Huh I will admit I did not consider that, that people were basically accustomed to inhaling smoke from birth and probably didn’t even notice the negative effects.
Sure, never said the logic was foolproof. If I with no knowledge of what capsaicin was encountered a chili pepper plant in the wild and had no cultural exposure to it, tasted it, I’d probably mark it as non-edible and move on.
Applying my OP logic to that I guess I’d hope people would realize with a painful sunburn ok too much sun exposure is NOT good, a little isn’t so bad. I’d hope no rational person would keep going out to sunbathe until they had cracked fractals of skin with pus oozing between them and still insist this is healthy as hell.
PS I really need to learn how to multi quote!
The same with broccoli.
Was just reading a book about the first Emperor of China and there’s stuff about “elixir of immortality” and how they used various toxic materials for it, lead and quicksilver and whatnot. There’s a long list of horrible side-effects but the alchemists and wise men just claimed that those were signs of the diseases leaving the body, which meant it was working. :eek:
“Hey! Let’s all hold microwaves up to our heads!”
I smoked non-filters for 40 years. Health aside, I could always stop a coughing fit by having a cigarette.
When Virginia colonists took tobacco back to Europe, the atmosphere in European cities in general and British ones in particular were so horribly polluted with smoke and other particulates, that tobacco smoke was probably on the relatively benign side as far as health was concerned. And over the next few centuries, it got worse before it got better.
Obviously, it took at least a person’s lifetime before anyone could have possibly thought there was any particular harm that tobacco smoking could do. This was probably recognized in the first century of the tobacco era, and for that reason, every tobacco-using culture discouraged or prohibited children from smoking and/or chewing, so its adverse effects must have been recognized.
In the USA, the widespread autumn burning of grass clippings, leaves and lawn cuttings was not banned until about 50 years ago, because there was insufficient medical data to associate that kind of smoke particulate with health hazards.
It’s like asking how come it took people so long to figure out that salt, refined sugar and tropical oils were hazardous to one’s health. There was nothing about them that was blatantly obvious to consumers. And even if there was, there was quite correctly a presumption that moderate consumption would be harmless.