by Lydia Kang
8
Tobacco
Of Cigarette Prescriptions, Creamy Snuff, and Blowing Smoke Up Your Ass
“More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!”
“20,679 physicians say Luckies are less irritating!”
“Give your throat a vacation, smoke a fresh cigarette!”
Such were the effusive claims for the health benefits of cigarette smoking, found in colorful advertisements in magazines around the country in the early to mid-twentieth century. Was it any wonder that more than 50 percent of the adult male population smoked in 1955? Physicians themselves were avid smokers; around the same time, 30 percent of doctors reported smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day.
Two generations later and, in the United States anyway, smoking levels are now at historic lows. It’s a seismic shift in sixty years for a highly addictive substance that people were convinced was a health aid for the previous five centuries.
But don’t get us wrong: Tobacco is still the deadliest plant known to mankind, directly responsible for more than 6 million deaths each year worldwide. Although widely recognized today as a killer, tobacco also has a long history as a medicinal herb and was embraced in both the Old and New Worlds for its healing properties well into the twentieth century.
Joyful News out of the New Found World
Native to the Americas, the sixty species of Nicotiana have been cultivated for thousands of years. By the time Spanish explorers arrived in the fifteenth century, tobacco was in widespread use across both North and South America as a ritual aid, a recreational drug, and a medicinal herb.
Members of Columbus’s crew observed the indigenous Taíno people of present-day Cuba and Haiti burning tobacco leaves in torches to ward off diseases and disinfect homes and ritual places. The crew also reportedly saw the Taíno snuff large quantities of dried tobacco, a process that resulted in a quick loss of consciousness and was possibly employed by local physicians as a way to knock someone out before conducting trepanning surgery. (While there remains some debate about the origin of the word tobacco, the Taíno word for either the tobacco leaves themselves or for the pipe used to smoke them is a strong contender.)
Later explorers continued to observe widespread medicinal use of tobacco across the New World. In Mexico, it was employed as an antidiarrheal, a purgative, and an emollient. The plant was not only dried and smoked, but its leaves were also applied locally to help heal wounds and burns, and powdered versions were swallowed to relieve mucus buildup in the throat. In California, desert tribes crushed tobacco leaves to create poultices to treat inflammatory diseases such as rheumatism, as well as skin infections such as eczema. The leaves were also smoked as a cure for the common cold, and were considered to be particularly effective if mixed with sage leaves. (And now you’ve got an enjoyable alternative to downing a bottle of DayQuil next winter.)
The “discovery” of the New World was like an adrenaline shot for European physicians, who practically tripped over themselves in their excitement to uncover the healing properties of the cornucopia of new plants suddenly added to their medicine cabinets. Tobacco was one of the first champion New World crops warmly embraced by European doctors and dubbed a panacea (although it certainly wasn’t the last).
Spanish doctor Nicolás Monardes published a popular history of New World medicinal plants in the 1570s, which included a glowing section on tobacco. The book’s euphoric title, Joyful News Out of the New Found World, says a lot about the general feelings toward the new plant discoveries. Tobacco, Monardes insisted, could cure upward of twenty diseases including cancer, which is one of the most deeply ironic statements ever made in medical literature. (About seventeen people will die from smoking-induced lung cancer in America in the next hour alone.)
A Pawnee midwife uses medicinal tobacco on a woman in labor.
The Right Snuff: Early Tobacco Champions
Another early medical champion of tobacco was French ambassador to the Portuguese court Jean Nicot, whose name was forever exalted in the annals of medical literature as the origin of the word nicotine. (Nicotine is one of more than four thousand chemicals generated when tobacco leaves are burned, but it’s the nastiest one in the bunch because it’s what stimulates the brain and nervous system of smokers, setting the stage for addiction.)
Nicot arrived in Lisbon in 1559, where he was quickly introduced to tobacco. A curious man with a scholarly bent, Nicot was deeply intrigued by this New World plant and early Portuguese experiments with its medical properties. The ambassador/budding physician decided to give it a go himself, so he whipped up a tobacco ointment, then nabbed a local man with a tumor and had the man apply the ointment regularly to his unwanted growth. (The local man’s opinion in the matter has been lost to history.) The ointment worked, persuading Nicot that he was on the right track.
Convinced that tobacco was a nostrum and a potential cure for all manner of ills, Nicot bundled up some tobacco plants and made a triumphant return to France, where Catherine de’ Medici was ruling as queen. In 1561, Nicot presented Catherine with tobacco plant leaves and instructions on how to powder the leaves and inhale them through her nose to relieve headaches. Catherine, who suffered from terrible headaches (poisoning all your enemies has that effect), took Nicot’s advice. His tobacco snuff worked, making Catherine, and by extension the entirety of the French court, into an overnight tobacco convert.
As the French were setting just as many fashions in the sixteenth century as they are in the twenty-first, tobacco snuff quickly became de rigueur throughout the courts of Europe. There was hardly an aristocratic party you could attend in the late 1500s where someone wouldn’t offer you a hit of the stuff. And it was only a matter of time before the fashionable drug made its way down the social strata and into the embrace of the masses. His fame and fortune secured, Nicot retired to the countryside and got to work on his next obsession: compiling a French dictionary.
In 1773, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus named the genus of tobacco cultivars Nicotiana in Nicot’s honor, a nod to his role in popularizing the plant. It would be a dubious honor, however, once nicotine’s seductive power was properly understood.
Despite Catherine de’ Medici spreading the tobacco gospel, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses for the plant, which had its naysayers in Europe from its early days of adoption. One of the most prominent anti-tobacco voices was that old killjoy King James I of England, who, writing in 1604, called tobacco smoking “loathsome.” James went on, in a particularly prescient passage, to describe tobacco as “harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.”
James I’s sentiments about tobacco began to catch on. As the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progressed, the plant was no longer seen as a universal panacea. Tobacco smoke, however, was still recommended by some physicians for particular purposes. Primitive Physick, for example, a popular medical book from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, recommended tobacco smoke—and this is one of our favorite remedies—to relieve earaches. If you suffered from an earache, all you had to do was grab a friend, and then have him light a pipe and blow the smoke deep into your ear canal. (Fun experiment: Try accompanying your coworker on his next cigarette break and asking for the same remedy.)
The myriad wonders of the tobacco plant.
Blowing Smoke Up Your Arse
Ear canals weren’t the only body opening just waiting to receive a strong dose of secondhand smoke. You know the phrase “blowing smoke up your ass”? Well, you can disgust your next blind date with the true life medical origin of that phrase. Because literally blowing smoke up someone’s ass was a sanctioned resuscitation method in the eighteenth century. The practice was so popular that tobacco smoke enema kits were manufactured and available for sale to concerned households. It’s always best to be ready for a medical emergency and nothing says “prepared” like having a tobacco smoke enema kit next to your first aid supplies.
Tobacco smoke enemas had their day in the sun in the e
ighteenth century when they were embraced by the British medical community for a very particular purpose: the resuscitation of the drowned. These were the days when drowning in the River Thames was such a frequent occurrence that a society was actually formed and funded with the sole purpose of promoting the resuscitation of drowned people. Elaborately dubbed The Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning, its members prowled the dangerous banks of the Thames, their tobacco smoke enema kits at the ready should any poor soul stumble into the river and need to be revived. If that happened, the society members would leap to the rescue, hauling the apparently drowned person out of the river, tearing off all of his clothes, rolling him onto his stomach, sticking an enema tube up his bottom, and striking up the fumigator and the bellows.
The smoke enema kit. No home is safe without one.
The bellows, by the way, were a welcome addition to the enema kit. Before the inclusion of bellows, you were stuck with blowing the smoke into someone’s butt yourself. God forbid you accidentally inhaled. The results would not only be beyond disgusting but also potentially deadly. If your victim had cholera, for example, then you’d be a goner, too, by virtue of sucking down cholera bacteria. And that, my friends, just about takes the cake for “worst way to die” featured in this book.
Remember not to inhale.
The medical thinking behind the kits seemed quite sound to its promoters, particularly Dr. William Hawes and Dr. Thomas Cogan, who founded the Thames rescue brigade. The smoke blown into the bodies of the apparently drowned was thought to accomplish two medical goals: warming the victim and stimulating respiration.
Of course, blowing smoke up someone’s butt doesn’t actually accomplish either of those goals, and that’s why the phrase has been adopted today to mean an insincere compliment. It’s a meaningless, pointless gesture. But it did give eighteenth-century rescuers a very … intimate view of a person’s private area in an era when ankles were considered risqué, which probably explains some of the society’s popularity.
If the smoke enema didn’t revive the victim, the institution members turned to a much more reliable method that actually saved lives: artificial respiration. Mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing, however, was largely frowned upon by the medical community as “vulgar,” as compared, say, to blowing smoke up someone’s butt. Would-be resuscitators used bellows to pump air into the lungs of the nearly drowned. Midwives, however, knew better and regularly practiced mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing to resuscitate infants. Thankfully, the rest of the medical community eventually caught up with the midwives, mouth-to-mouth lost its “vulgar” connotation, and countless lives were saved as a result.
Smoke a Cigarette, Clean Your House!
Although tobacco smoke enemas were never a good idea, tobacco did have a brief run as a disinfectant, an intriguing use of its smoke that may not be ineffective. Columbus’s crew had observed the Taíno people of Cuba using burning tobacco leaves to disinfect homes where people had been sick, and its reputation as a disinfectant migrated with the plant to Europe.
During a plague outbreak in London in 1665, schoolchildren were actually told to smoke in their classrooms as a way to ward off the disease. In what was possibly the only upside to being alive in London during a plague outbreak, the schoolchildren didn’t have to play hooky to get their nicotine fix.
Similarly, in 1882, in an outbreak of smallpox in Bolton, all the residents of a particular workhouse were issued tobacco to help keep the establishment free of germs.
Tobacco’s potential as a disinfectant was only occasionally examined by physicians. In 1889, an anonymous author writing in the British Medical Journal mentioned that the compound pyridine, present in tobacco smoke, kills germs and in turn appears to lower the risk of tobacco smokers to infectious diseases such as diphtheria and typhus. In 1913, an article in The Lancet further examined pyridine in tobacco smoke, again demonstrating that tobacco smoke killed the bacterium causing cholera.
Both articles, however, were also quick to mention that the harmful effects of smoking tobacco outweighed its potential benefits, an argument that has largely halted any further investigation into tobacco’s potential use as a disinfectant.
Tobacco Toothpaste
Some American Indian tribes combined powdered tobacco with lime or chalk to create a sort of toothpaste for teeth cleaning, a potential benefit not enjoyed by today’s tobacco users, who frequently have stained teeth from chewing or smoking tobacco.
Tobacco toothpaste is still in use in South Asia, where companies such as IPCO market it commercially. IPCO’s toothpaste, Creamy Snuff, in addition to having the best toothpaste name ever created (take that, Colgate), contains clove oil, glycerin, spearmint, menthol, camphor, and, of course, tobacco. Creamy Snuff is particularly popular among South Asian women, some of whom use the toothpaste eight to ten times per day under encouragement from the manufacturer to “let it linger” in their mouths. (The tobacco in Creamy Snuff is not the only entry, by the way, in the competition for Worst Toothpaste Ingredient found in this book. Check out the radioactive toothpaste profiled in the Radium & Radon chapter for another competitor.)
The Tobacco Industry Beds Down with Physicians
The nineteenth century seemed like the beginning of the end for medicinal tobacco. In 1811, English scientist Ben Brodie discovered that nicotine was harmful to the heart. In 1828, researchers went on to isolate the nicotine alkaloid, a discovery that further lowered medical opinion of the plant, as the negative impact of nicotine on the brain and nervous system could now be observed.
By the early twentieth century, concerns began to surface about the health risks of cigarette smoking. An alarmed tobacco industry, in an effort to allay consumer fears, forged a powerful alliance with physicians. Doctors, who smoked almost as frequently as the general public, were still digesting the recent crop of research indicating potential health risks of smoking with the curious fact that not everyone who smokes ends up sick. It wasn’t terribly difficult, therefore, to find physicians willing to offer testimonials for tobacco companies, especially when they were offered cases of cigarettes to feed their own habits in exchange for their support.
Starting with a successful American Tobacco Company campaign that advertised Lucky Strikes as being “less irritating,” physicians began cropping up in colorful ads in magazines promoting cigarettes. In the 1930s, Philip Morris, a newcomer to the game, made a name for itself with a large and successful advertising campaign reporting that a “group of doctors” found its cigarettes to improve or completely clear irritation of the nose and throat from smoking. The campaign almost single-handedly made Philip Morris into a major brand.
The doctors-with-cigarettes advertising frenzy came to a head with the “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette” campaign launched by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Between 1946 and 1952, Camel advertisements were led by this slogan generated from an “independent survey.” The survey, as it turned out, was actually conducted by the William Esty Co., an R. J. Reynolds subsidiary, which questioned physicians about their favorite cigarette brand after providing them with complimentary cartons of Camel cigarettes.
Tobacco Today
“More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!”
The “More doctors …” campaign was the beginning of the end. As more and more studies surfaced showing the harmful effects of cigarette smoking, tobacco was on its way out the medical door. Physicians transitioned from using tobacco in treatments to understanding, and then combating, the numerous ill-effects of smoking (cancer, emphysema, heart disease, asthma, and diabetes, to name a few).
In the meantime, however, we had embraced recreational tobacco smoking on a global scale. Even though the harmful effects of smoking have been well understood and heavily promoted for decades, there are still 1.3 billion people around the world who smoke cigarettes regularly, and the global tobacco industry is a $300 billion juggernaut. So physicians have been
understandably a bit too busy fighting the negative impacts of smoking on the human body to further experiment with any positive properties of tobacco.
And happily for modern-day walkers along the River Thames, tobacco smoke enemas are no longer the preferred resuscitation method for the nearly drowned. We can all feel a bit safer when visiting the Thames knowing there’s not a creepster waiting in the wings to blow tobacco smoke up our bums if we should fall in.
9
Cocaine
Euphoric Cocaine Experiments, Sigmund Freud, Cocaine Toothache Drops,Vin Mariani, and a Dying President
A week after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, one of the last battles of the Civil War was fought on the Chattahoochee River separating Alabama and Georgia. Few things in life are as deeply ironic as being forced to participate in a battle after a war has effectively ended. Thanks to glacially slow communication lines, however, the Battle of Columbus happened a full week after Lee had surrendered his troops at Appomattox Courthouse.
At the battle, a thirty-four-year-old Confederate lieutenant colonel named John Pemberton very nearly lost his life during a cavalry charge. Pemberton took a nasty saber wound to his chest that could have easily killed him, but thankfully for him and for future soda enthusiasts, he lived.
Above: Lt. Col. John Pemberton, plus beard. Below: An innocent coca shrub, perfect for your backyard.
While recovering from his wounds, Pemberton, like many of his comrades on both sides of the Civil War, became addicted to morphine. Unlike many of his fellow wounded soldiers, however, Pemberton was a pharmacist in his civilian life. As such, he had access to a variety of drugs and herbal supplements with which he could experiment. (And experiment he did, concocting a variety of patent medicines such as Botanic Blood Balm, Tripex Liver Pills, Globe Flower Cough Syrup, and Indian Queen Hair Dye.) After recovering, he was determined to find—and patent—an alternative painkiller to morphine. Something a little less, you know, opiate-y.
