TO SMOKE OR NOT TO SMOKE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 726, 12 June 1953, Page 6

TO SMOKE OR NOT TO SMOKE

Herein is not only a great vanity, but a great contempt of God’s gifts, that the sweetne:s of man’s’ breath, being a good gift of God, should be wilfully corrupted by this stinking smoke. JAMES I, A Counterblast of Tobacco. No woman should marry a_ teetotaller, Or a man who does not smoke.

ROBERT LOUIS

STEVENSON

URING the three hundred years which elapsed _be- : tween these statements by _a pair of shrewd Scotsmen, a great change had taken place in European manners. Smoking, which to- | day has become almost as universal a habit as eating and drinking, was unknown in England before the day when Sir Walter Raleigh came back from Virginia with a pipe presented to him by his friend Ralph Lane, the colony’s governor and. the first known English smoker. Through Raleigh’s influence and example (he even "tooke a pipe of tobacco a little before he went to the the habit spread among the bearded sailors and_ knights who thronged the court of Elizabeth I. Despite the strictures of James when he Bearings king, the smoking habit rapidly took hold throughout the world. Is tobacco a curse or a blessing, a noxious weed or a heaven-sent anodyne? The BBC has now issued a transcription of Nesta Pain’s feature’ programme. Smoking, which examines the history and practice of smoking since the introduction of tobacco to Europe in the 16th Century. The script was written by a young doctor named Richard Gordon, and he weighs the. evidence for and against tobacco, from the condemnation of James I to the considered opinions of a modern psychiatrist, a physiologist, and a statistician. He surveys the habit

in its various social aspects, its probable physical effects, and the reason for the hold it has upon people today. Whatever the doctors say it is certain that the mild narcotic effect of tobacco satisfies a secret craving in most of us, The average Englishman smokes something like 2000 cigarettes a year, and in America and other countries where the tobacéo duty is less, the average is probably much higher. Tobacco was thought to have almost miraculous healing powers when the Spaniard Francisco Fernandez first brought the plant to Europe. Jean Nicot, whose surname was given to it by scientists, recommended the consumption of tobacco leaves as a cure for everything from ulcers to apparent drowning, and even smoking was thought to be a preventative for disease in the 17th Century, when schoolboys at Eton were taught pipe-smoking to ward off infection during the Great Plague. In the Victorian age, however, it was accused of causing a number of com-

plaints from nervous irritability to general paralysis. Anti-Tobaccé societies sprang up, and the report of a meeting at one of these societies contained the following stern warning: One gentleman at a lecture took a fine cat from under a table, and poured a small quantity of liquid upon the cat’s tongue, through a glass tube, and the cat was dead instantaneously. But what was it that had poisoned it? It was the juice from the stem of a meerschaum pipe, which some of our young men delight so much in smoking! Probably this apocryphal report was used as the excuse for a piece of satiric doggerel published by one of the big tobacco firms in a pamphlet called The Smoker’s Garland. The booklet contained literary praise of tobacco from people as varied as Carlyle, Lamb, William Cowper, and the anonymous contributors to the Harvard Crimson, an American undergraduate magazine. Tobacco brands once had more exotic names than they possess now. Rifle Cake, Navy Cut, Rose Bud, May Flower, Bristol Bird’s Eye, The Prairie Flower, Golden Cloud (Finest Bright Honey Dew), The Right Sort, were some of them. Our Mutual Friend was advertised as being "mild and sweetflavoured. It is like your first lovefresh, genial, and rapturous. Like that, it fills up all the Cravings of your soul:’ Old Crow always came with an illustration on the packet of "Pocahontas interceding for the life of Captain Smith, founder of the Virginia settlement, 1607." Another advertisement said: "C *s cigarettes are made by English Girls, Made in a Model English (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Factory, Not made in Slums of Cairo or Constantinople, Not"made in Continental Prisons." Tobacco has inspired more than one poet, from Edmund Spenser’s praise of "divine tobacco" to Charles Lamb’s "For thy sake Tobacco, I would do anything but die." J. M. Barrie wrote a book describing with quiet humour his lifelong flirtation with "My Lack Nicotine." The 'BBC’s programme, however. is more interested in the medical aspects of smoking. Modern laboratory tests show that smoking causes constriction of the blood vessels in the limbs. It may also have a constricting effect on the arteries supplying the heart. Smoking will be heard from 2YA at 9.30 a.m. this Sunday, June 14, from 1YC at 9.32 p.m. on Tuesday, June 16, and later from other National stations.