Is Smoking Injurious?

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 8, 1906

Is Smoking Injurious?

FROM an article by R. Brudenell Carter, F. R. C. S., in The Grand Magazine, the first section of which is devoted to the poison-producing powers of tobacco and its deleterious effects upon the human system, we take the following paragraphs:—

“But the one great fact concerning disease produced by tobacco is that it is liable to excite a peculiar and quite definite form of inflammation of the optic nerves, which, if the tobacco be not abandoned, leads to blindness. For many years no month passed which did not bring to my consulting room or to my hospital a patient to whom I had to say that he was destroying his sight by tobacco, that he required no treatment but its complete and absolute abandonment, and that if he followed this prescription, he would in all probability get well. Those who had strength of mind abstained and recovered; those whose wills and energies had been sapped by the narcotic continued on their downward path.”

“Such cases are not absolutely numerous, but they are sufficiently so to establish the proposition that tobacco not only ‘soothes,’ or, as I would rather say, ‘stupefies,’ the nervous system generally, but that it also excites destructive changes in certain parts of it. Alterations in the nerves of sight are produced by other drugs as well as by tobacco, and are described generally as ‘toxic,’ but examples from other drugs are rare, and tobacco is responsible for the greater part of the occurring cases.”

“In the return for last year of the patients attended at the great Eye Hospital for the Netherlands, at Utrecht, I find fifteen of these ‘toxic’ cases among 6,823 patients, the great majority of whom were, of course, suffering from maladies of very common occurrence. There were fifty-seven other cases of trouble or wasting of the nerves, and it is probable that a considerable proportion of these were due to the same cause.”