p. 565 | Temperance by Dr. Dean

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 16, 1880

Temperance.

By Dr. Dean

ABSORPTION OF TOBACCO INTO THE BLOOD.

THE discovery of this plant in America was made by Sir Walter Raleigh, and it is now, as is well known, largely cultivated, particularly in some of the Southern States.

Every atom and tissue of our bodies is formed from the blood, and the blood is made from what we put in the mouth. Blood made from bread and butter and milk and meats, and all natural and wholesome food, is good, and helps to build up the system in a strong and proper manner; but blood that is produced by tobacco is not only unnatural, and does no good whatever to the body, but does harm by introducing into the veins a deadly poison.

Blood is good or bad, according to the material from which it is made. Accordingly, blood from that which is itself a poison must be poison, unless the poison has been in some way extracted.

There is poison in the potato, but this is destroyed by heat. In tobacco there is no protection against the poison which it contains, and the deadly matter goes right into the blood.

Nor is this injury any the less real because slow. The harm done the body by the use of tobacco is permanent, and year after year becomes worse and worse.

Because boys do not see men who chew fall down dead as men do who take strychnine, they are apt to shake the head dubiously when told by their elders that tobacco is a poison.

Spit a mouthful of tobacco into the mouth of some small animal, and it will die. Men—the larger animals—do not, because what they take is small, and the damage done by it is partly repaired by the good, strong blood which their food makes, and which they take into the body by the side of this poisoned blood of which I am now speaking.

Every mouthful of the tobacco juice contains a certain quantity of nicotine, which is a virulent poison.

Imagine a man opening his veins with a penknife and letting arsenic or strychnine into himself! But what is the difference, except that the mineral poison would kill him at once, and the vegetable poison—tobacco—may kill him in time, if he goes on with it and uses it excessively?

If even the water which we drink affects the quantity and quality of the blood, surely tobacco juice must. The idea of any man drinking impure, muddy water is unpleasant even to think of, but what is bad water compared with the juice of tobacco?

You may think that chewers do not swallow the juice of the weed. They do. They swallow some, and more, too, than you or they think. With all the amount they expectorate from the mouth, some, notwithstanding, is swallowed.

Besides, there is a large amount absorbed. This process of absorption I must stop to explain. You bear in mind that, all over the inside of the mouth, are glands in great number. The duty of these glands is to do somewhat as a sponge does when put in water—suck up the liquids that they touch. All the saliva that touches them is more or less filled with the juices of what we chew—whatever it is—and these juices, of course, float around in the mouth, and as soon as they touch the glands, are, more or less, absorbed, or sucked up by them. So that, partly by swallowing a little and absorbing a good deal more, the system, in the course of a day's chewing, gets a good deal of the poison of the tobacco juice taken into it.

As I before said, every drop taken into the body goes to the blood—and blood of the poorest sort—blood that not only does no good toward building the body up, keeping it healthy and making it long-lived, but which, on the contrary does harm, poisons the system, renders the tissues of the body liable to disease, weakens certain functions, increases the likelihood of insanity, and of sudden and even premature death.

If more can be said against anything that goes into the mouth of man, I do not know what that article is.

Smoking is less injurious than chewing, because less poison is swallowed and absorbed; but even this is injurious in a great degree.

To say nothing in this article of the social and moral reasons against the use of tobacco, the medical ones which I have given ought to defer everybody from ever soiling his lips with the weed.

I may add that the use of intoxicating drinks is to be classed with that of the use of tobacco in its ill effects on the body.—Dr. Dean.