p. 177 | Tobacco Dangerous

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 12, 1883

Tobacco Dangerous.

To ILLUSTRATE the danger of using tobacco as a medicine, Dr. Mussey says: "A doctor in New Hampshire, a few years ago, was consulted by the mother of a girl four years old who was afflicted with a severe eruption on the face. The mother was anxious, from having heard stories of its efficacy in other cases, to make an application of tobacco; the physician, however, advised to the contrary, and left her to visit her sick neighbor. While prescribing for the latter, he was called back in haste to the child, whom he found senseless and motionless on the floor. The mother informed him that, being still persuaded tobacco would be beneficial, she had, after he retired, taken some from the bowl of a pipe and rubbed it over the child's face; that the child set out to walk across the room immediately after the application, but had not gone half way before it fell in the condition in which he found it. The physician worked over an hour resorting to various means for resuscitating the child, the pulse occasionally reviving and then dying away again, till, finally animation was restored. For years afterward the child was subject to alarming nervous symptoms, and is now puny and feeble. Its constitution previous to the experiment was good, but the shock upon the nervous system was so severe that it has never recovered and probably never will."