When Tobacco Was A Panacea

In Woody Allen's classic comedy Sleeper, the main character - played by Woody Allen himself, of course - wakes up in a twenty-third century where everything bad is good for you. Steak, ice cream and beer are the ultimate in health food, and good-tasting indulgences are widely agreed to have medicinal value.

But you don't need to go far into the future to enjoy such a world. You'll still need a time machine, of course, but you just need to set it the other way: back in time. After all, convalescents used to be encouraged to eat red meat to keep up their strength, And beer was positively lauded for its medical uses. For example, in the early twentieth century, Marcel Proust's masterpiece

In Search of Lost Time depicts its neurasthenic, asthmatic young hero getting drunk for the first time, on the advice of his doctor: "To prevent the choking fits which the journey might otherwise give me the doctor had advised me to take, as we started, a good stiff dose of beer or brandy "And if after that I went and drank a good deal too much in the restaurant-car of the train, that was because I felt that otherwise I should have a more violent attack than usual," writes Proust. (He goes on to tell us how comfortable the train suddenly felt, how happy everything seemed, how friendly everybody was, and how "pleasant" the sound of his own slurred voice became. You're the guy, Marcel!)

And what about tobacco? Well, soon after its discovery by Europeans, we find smoking enjoying an aura of medical respectability. That's no surprise, considering the circumstances in which Europeans first observed tobacco being smoked: as part of sociable rituals carried out by the native inhabitants of this continent, especially those of the highly-developed Mayan, Aztec and Carib cultures.

It was used, at various times and by various groups, to diagnose illnesses, exorcize demons, treat symptoms, and feed the spirits that were assumed to give shamans their power. And since smoking offers the body the quickest jolt of nicotine in the highest concentration (as compared with chewing it, drinking it in tea, snorting it, or, ahem, using it as an enema, which have also been practiced), tobacco was most often smoked in these sorts of rituals.

Europeans, especially at that pre-Reformation moment, were well-suited to appreciate the spiritual role that tobacco played in native religions - since the worship style of medieval Catholicism made room of its own for sweet smoke. Incense was, and remains in many places, an essential part of Catholic worship. Not quite the same thing, but the parallels might be significant.

It's scarcely much of a surprise, then, to find doctor after doctor during the Renaissance praising smoking as a sort of medical panacea - a trend that is well-described in the marvelously informative book Smoke, edited by Sandra Gilman and Zhou Xun. They tell us, for example, that Jean Nicot - yes, the guy for whom nicotine was named - introduced smoking to the French in the sixteenth century not as a great new hobby, or way to look cool in a cafe, but as a cure-for-what-ails-you.

It goes further. In 1571 a Seville doctor, Nicolas Monardes, was so impressed with the powers of tobacco that he called it a "holy herb" - among other things, he thought, it helped people relax. (It's possible he had some other herb in mind) Many doctors during the same period praised it as a cure for, or at least a palliative of, the dreaded then-new disease of syphilis. In fact, the doctor who gave us our word for syphilis, Girolamo Fracastoro, at one point flirted with the idea that smoking could cure it!

Writers during this period don't stop at making smoking a possible cure for diseases, either. They laud its ability to make people work harder and longer without stopping (any day-laborer has seen this phenomenon in action), to allow people to ignore hunger without discomfort (many models have benefited from precisely this power), and other advantages.
As time went on, this praise drops off sharply. But the symptoms of tobacco-high that these writers describe are real enough - cigar smokers of today are familiar with them. They may be among the reasons why people smoke.

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