The outline of a lecture delivered in Oxford by permission of the Vice Chancellor and The Mayor and dedicated to the under graduates of the University / by the secretary of the British Anti-Tobacco Society.

  • Reynolds, Thomas
Date:
[1854]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The outline of a lecture delivered in Oxford by permission of the Vice Chancellor and The Mayor and dedicated to the under graduates of the University / by the secretary of the British Anti-Tobacco Society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    room stinks of smoke), “ begin to smoke too early ! ” But do they not learn of their elders, I enquired. “ Yes,” said lie “ I suppose they do.” Yes, and I know it. Gentlemen throw away their cigar ends, and the boys pick them up, puff them out, and thus the habit is acquired. “That reminds me” he rejoined, “ of what I saw the other day in .Bath; the gentlemen smoked until they approached the sta¬ tion, and then threw away their cigars, and the boys scrambled for them.” It is to be feared, many have in this way com¬ menced a career, which has ended in ruin. Smoking has induced habits of indolence and dissipation, and thus com¬ panionship with the abandoned may be traced to picking up a still burning cigar. Take heed of throwing temptation in the way of the young. Could they be dissuaded from the use of Tobacco, a vast amount of penury, sickness, and misery, would be prevented in their history. Tew persons are prepared to receive the assertion, but it would not be difficult to prove that more persons lose their health, and probably many more lose their lives, as the result of smoking, than of drinking, and as for lunacy, the numbers who de¬ prive themselves of intellect by the use of snuff and tobacco, is doubtless far greater than from any other cause. Medical men not unfrequently admit, that nothing is more detri¬ mental to mental power than Tobacco, and certainly the worst vices to which mankind resort, are generally found to have been perpetrated by persons who indulge in its use. I have heard a person with his cigar in his mouth, and who had once been a professor of religion, say, when reproved for sabbath desecration, that if he thought God wished to inter¬ fere with the liberties of his creatures, that he would rather be in hell without him, than in heaven with him! There is no aspect in which this subject can be viewed, which does not present motives to seek its suppression. In a variety of ways its use is a snare and a scourge. In the Oxford Chronicle for the past week, reference is made to some cases of affliction in the cancer hospital, of a very serious nature, headed Warning to Excessive Smokers. “We learn that there are some frightful cases in the hospital just now, which are worth noticing as a. warning to others. One is the case of a cabman, who was smoking his pipe on the stand, and being called off hastily, he tore away a portion of the skin of the lower lip, which stuck to the pipe; he has suffered a martyrdom. The lip continued to increase to the size of a man’s fist, it then
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