Tobacco and the diseases it produces / by Charles R. Drysdale ; being the substance of an address delivered at Exeter Hall, London, May, 1873, at Manchester Free Trade Hall, March 27, 1873, and at Guildford, on March 6, 1875.

  • Charles Robert Drysdale
Date:
[1875?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Tobacco and the diseases it produces / by Charles R. Drysdale ; being the substance of an address delivered at Exeter Hall, London, May, 1873, at Manchester Free Trade Hall, March 27, 1873, and at Guildford, on March 6, 1875. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tobacco amaurosis describe themselves as always living in a dim light, even at noon-day. Mr. George Critchett, the great London authority on diseases of the eye, tells me that he is constantly consulted by gentlemen for com¬ mencing blindness, caused solely by great smoking. He condemns, therefore, smoking in most unqualified terms, as most dangerous to human health. Tobacco has no food value ; and nicotine merely stimu¬ lates, but adds no force to the economy. Smoking causes 4 undue fluidity in the blood and pallor in the skin. It produces debility, nausea, and sickness of the stomach. It causes weakness and irregular action of the heart. It causes enlargement of the tonsils, sore throat, and blackens the teeth and makes’the gums spongy and red, and also the mucous membrane of the mouth, throat, and air-passages. Hence, it tends to produce bronchitis and cough, from the irritation of the mucous membrane of the lungs. Great smokers are not often in thoroughly good health, in my experience. Thus, I once took two hundred consecutive cases of great smokers appearing before me as out-patients at the Metropolitan Free Hospital, confining myself to such as had for years smoked at least lialf-an-ounce of tobacco (usually shag tobacco) daily. Most of these men were more or less subject to some of the symptoms found to occur in animals when artificially slowly poisoned by nicotine. A great proportion of them were subject to dys¬ pepsia, vomiting, diarrhoea or constipation, palpitation of the heart, nervousness and tremulousness. In young men who commence smoking early, pallor of the face is often well marked and great debility frequent; whilst palpitation of the heart is often bitterly complained of. Factories.—Hr. Kostral, physician to the Royal Factory of Tobacco at Iglau (Ann. cVHygiene pub. 1871) brought before the Medical Society at Vienna, in 1871, some statistics relating to the workers in that government tobacco factory. It seems that there are 1,942 of these workers, of ages from thirteen to fifty-six years. They are only taken into the factory if likely to live there for twenty years. The workshops are well arranged and ventilated; but during their ten hours of work the operatives are
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