Versatile Tobacco

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31107, 9 July 1966, Page 13

Versatile Tobacco

/he People's Son "ba <4 -

writfen for "The Press" by

DERRICK ROONEY)

That was langsyne. when geese were swine. And turkeys chewed tobacco. And sparrows biggit in autd men’s beards, And moudies (molest delv’t potatoes.

This rhyme which appeared in a Scottish collection of the 1860 s, was described then as old. And, added its editor, it came in very well “on hearing any narrative a little beyond the bounds of the credible, and more especially when the narrator was suspected of hoaxing.” Considering some of the claims made for tobacco when it was introduced to the British Isles some hundreds of years ago, his doubts were well founded. A second rhyme in the same collection summarises the claims:

Tobacco and tobacco-reek, When l am weel, they make me sick; Tobacco and tobacco-reek. They make me well when I am sick.

Tobacco, named nicotiana after John Nicot, the French Ambassador to Portugal who procured the seeds, was brought to England from America about 1570, and almost immediately attracted the attention of the herbalists. One of these was the famous John Gerard, author of “Gerard's Herball,” a vastly entertaining compilation of folk-lore, myth and quackery which is still being reprinted. Gerard grew tobacco plants in his London garden and prized them highly for their curative properties. He called it Henbane of Peru; “it bringeth drowsiness,” he wrote, “troubleth the senses, and maketh a man as it were drunk by taking the fume only.” But it was a remedy for “the paine of the head called the Megram or Migrant,” cured the fits of the mother and, if roasted in hot embers and applied to the grieved part, mitigated the pains of the gout.

The distilled water of the leaves cured ague, catarrh, dizziness of the head and rheums, cleared the sight and took away “the webs and spots thereof.” The oil dropped into the ears cured deafness, and, if applied to

the face, took away “the lentils, rednesse and spots thereof.” It was also given “unto such as are accustomed to swoune,” and used in ointments against “tumours, apostumes, old ulcers of hard curation, botches, scabbes, stinging with nettles, carbuncles, poisoned arrows and wounds made with gunnes or any other weapons.” But at the same time Gerard warned against the dire consequences of smoking it; “My selfe speake by proof; who have cured of that infectious disease a great many, divers of which had been kept covered or kept under the sickenesse by the helpe of Tabaco as they thought, yet in the end have bin constrained to have unto such an hard knot, a crabbed wedge, or else had utterly perished.” Gerard’s contemporary, Culpeper, described tobacco as a hot martial plant. “A slight infusion of the fresh gathered leaves vomits roughly; is a good medicine for rheumatic pains; an ointment made of them, with hog’s-lard, is good for painful and inflamed piles," he wrote.

The powdered leaves, or a decoction of them killed lice and other vermin (no doubt true; nicotine sulphate, until recent years, was the main insecticide used in horticulture); and the smoke was “of efficacy in stoppages of the bowels, for destroying small worms and for the recovery of persons apparently drowned.” Truly a versatile plant!