A paper--of tobacco; treating of the rise, progress, pleasures, and advantages of smoking. With anecdotes of distinguished smokers, mems. on pipes and tobacco-boxes, and a tritical essay on snuff / By Joseph Fume [i.e. W.A. Chatto] [pseud.].

  • William Andrew Chatto
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A paper--of tobacco; treating of the rise, progress, pleasures, and advantages of smoking. With anecdotes of distinguished smokers, mems. on pipes and tobacco-boxes, and a tritical essay on snuff / By Joseph Fume [i.e. W.A. Chatto] [pseud.]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    this is a mistake, for it was generally known to bota- nists and physicians by this name previous to 1000. When the tobacco-plant was first introduced into Europe, it was not so much valued as a pleasing seda- tive when smoked, as for the supposed medicinal pro- perties of its leaves. The learned quacks of the Old World—deeply read in Dioscorides, Galen, Avicenna, and Arnoldus de Villa Nova, and singularly clear- sighted in judging of “ urines ”—found in it a remedy for every disease, and ascribed to it more virtues than even the “ ignorant savages 55 of America had sup- posed it to be endowed with. As its medicinal uses, except in a few cases, are now as generally denied by the “ faculty” as they were formerly asserted, it would seem that either the approved medicaments of one age lose their sanatory qualities in another, or that when nature herself effects a cure, doctors, both ancient and modern, are generally accustomed to ascribe the restoration of the patient’s health to the nostrums which they have happened to apply. There is a fashion in physic as well as in dress ; at one period tobacco is the panacea or universal all-heal; after that comes the Jesuits’ bark; then enters Dr. Sangrado, with his lancet and warm water; while at present the blue-pill and black-draught are in‘the ascendant—to be decried in their turn as injurious, and succeeded by some other nostrum equally infallible. c
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