Reading Anti-Tobacco Society : organized in the interest of humanity, and especially for the benefit of the young, who are the hope of the Church and the world. 1887 / W. Wyatt.

  • Wyatt, W.
Date:
1888?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reading Anti-Tobacco Society : organized in the interest of humanity, and especially for the benefit of the young, who are the hope of the Church and the world. 1887 / W. Wyatt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    So long ago as 1606, a Medical writer said— “ Tobacco is not good for the young, and should he called youth’s bane.” Another Physician writes— “Tobacco has spoilt and utterly ruined thousands of boys, inducing a dan¬ gerous precocity, developing the passions, softening the brain, the bones, and greatly injuring the spinal marrow and the entire nervous system. A boy who early learns to smoke is rarely known to make a man of much energy of char¬ acter, and generally lacks physical and muscular as well as mental energy. I would particularly warn boys who want to rise in the world to shun Tobacco and Cigars as a deadly poison.” There is not a solitary Physician that can disprove the statement that young smokers are inflicting an irreparable injury upon their constitutions, are poisoning the very springs of life, and will transmit to their descendants weaker bodies and weaker brains. The late Sir Benjamin Brodie, Bart., Sergeant-Surgeon to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, wrote— “ Boys get the habit of smoking because they think it manly to do so, not unfrt-quently because they have the example set them by their tutors, and partly because there is no friendly voice near to warn them as to the special ill consequences to which it might give rise when the process of growth is not yet complete, and the organs are not yet fully developed.” Carefully conducted investigation in France and the United States has proved that scholars and students who smoke are demoralised by the indulgence, and reduced by it to the lowest position in the classes. A completely matured organism may endure what is fatal to growing boys. [Dr. Richardson says: “Boys, while learning to smoke, are sometimes subject to terrible spasmodic seizures—there is a sensation of imminent death, the heart nearly ceases to beat, and short pains shoot through the chest.”] This is understood in Switzerland, and Tobacco smoking is forbidden till after the age of eighteen. Our own Admiralty have issued orders on the subject of smoking, one of which is to the effect that no officers or boys under the age of eighteen years are allowed to take up Tobacco or to smoke either on shore or afloat. The Senate of Connecticut has passed a bill for the compulsory teaching in public schools of the evil effects of Alcohol and Tobacco, .surd other States are following their example.