Revelations about tobacco : a prize essay on the history of tobacco, and its physical action on the human body, through its various modes of employment / by Hampton Brewer.
- Brewer, Hampton.
- Date:
- 1870
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Revelations about tobacco : a prize essay on the history of tobacco, and its physical action on the human body, through its various modes of employment / by Hampton Brewer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![through his nostrils, whence it would curl as two horns. He would then put his pipe into his pocket and exclaim, “There now, yer ’onor, and shure that’s as good as a male o’ victuals.” This satiating effect of tobacco (if I may so term it) may be bene- ficially brought to bear as a weighty reason against smoking. Anything that will act so directly on a nervous centre as to cause it to forget—so to speak—sensations transmitted to it from without, through the influence of the nerve cords, or on the distal extremities of nerve cords supplying an organ in which certain sensations are pro- duced, so as to paralyse them, and thereby cut off the transition of those sensations to the nerve centres where they become appre- ciated, must in itself be a powerful sedative. The effects of tobacco smoking, just alluded to, prove that it is capable of bringing about the ends above mentioned, and the habit of using an agent of*this nature must be injurious; and what is more, it is setting up an abnormal condition of the nervous system, and annihilates the integrity of the organic functions, through which the Creator designs to produce the felicity of man. “ Life,” has been said by a great man, “ to stand upon a tripod—the brain, the heart, and the lungs,” and with what truth has it been said, for injure one of its feet and you will most certainly affect all. Injure a man’s nervous system, and you will surely influence his heart’s action. I am at a loss to understand the rationale of the habit of taking: a pipe directly after meals, so often practiced by smokers. Several persons who invariably do this, I have questioned closely concerning the utility of so doing, but the only answer I can obtain from one and all, is “ that it is a habit.” [Note L.] The influence that smoking has over the heart is very marked ; it acts on the great circulatory organ through the nervous system. The first effect is to accelerate the rhythm of the pulse, but to decrease its volume ; the secondary to decrease both in a most palpable manner. Smoking also affects the regularity of the pulse, causing it frequently to intermit. I have on record the case of a young man—not by the way an inveterate smoker, but one who smoked as a rule about two or three pipes a day—whose pulse after smoking one pipe, which occu- pied, perhaps, ten minutes, rose eighteen beats per minute. I have repeatedly counted his pulse after smoking, and it invariably rises a out the same ratio per minute, after a single pipe; a second reduces it eleven beats per minute, below its natural standard.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28085784_0037.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
