Advice to the Young about Tobacco.
By Talmage
BUT, my friends, what advice had we better give to our young people? I say, in the first place, let us advise them to abstain from this habit because all the medical fraternity of the United States and Great Britain pronounce it the cause of widespread and terrific unhealth. Dr. Agnew, Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Olcott, Dr. Barnes, Dr. Woodward, Dr. Rush, Dr. Hosack, Dr. Harvey, Dr. Mott—all the medical fraternity, allopathic, homeopathic, hydropathic, eclectic—denounce the habit, and warn the community against it. One distinguished physician says: "This habit is the cause of seventy different styles of disease. This habit is the cause of nearly all the cases of cancer of the mouth." What is the testimony of the late Dr. John C. Warren, of Boston, than whom there is no higher authority? He says: "For more than thirty years, I have been in the habit of inquiring of patients who came to me with cancer of the tongue and lips whether they used tobacco, and, if so, whether they chewed or smoked; and if they have sometimes answered in the negative as to the first question, I can truly say that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, such cases are exceptions to the general rule. When, as is usually the case, one side of the tongue is affected with ulcerated cancer, it arises from the habitual retention of tobacco in contact with this part." Their united testimony is that it depresses the vitals of the system, and brings on nervousness and dyspepsia, and takes off twenty-five per cent. of the physical vigor of the people of this country, and, damaging this generation, damages the next, the accumulated curse going on to capture other centuries. It injures the mind. Another eminent physician, for a long time superintendent of the insane asylum at Northampton, Mass., says: "Fully half of the patients who have come to our asylum for treatment are the victims of tobacco." It is a sad thing, my brother, to damage the body; it is a worse thing to damage the mind; and any man of common sense knows that the nervous system immediately acts upon the brain. More than that; nearly all reformers will tell you that it tends to drunkenness. It creates unnatural thirst. There are those who use this narcotic who do not drink, but nearly all who drink use the narcotic; so that shows there is an immediate affinity between the two drugs. It was long ago demonstrated that a man cannot permanently reform from strong drink unless he gives up tobacco. In nearly all the cases where men, having been reformed, have fallen back, it has been shown they have first touched tobacco and then surrendered to intoxicants. The broad avenue leading down to the drunkard's grave and the drunkard's hell is strewn thick with tobacco leaves. What did Benjamin Franklin say? "I never saw a well man in the exercise of common sense who would say that tobacco did him any good." What did Thomas Jefferson say when arguing against the culture of tobacco? He said: "It is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness." Horace Greeley said of it: "It is a profane stench." Daniel Webster said: "If those men must smoke, let them take the horse-shed."—Talmage.