TOBACCO AS A CAUSE OF HEART TROUBLE AND SUDDEN DEATH by Thomas G. Roberts, M. D.

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 29, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 50.

TOBACCO AS A CAUSE OF HEART TROUBLE AND SUDDEN DEATH.

By Thomas G. Roberts, M. D.

THAT tobacco, through the nervous system, greatly disturbs the action of the heart, is well known to all who have given the subject any attention. Tobacco-users are often afflicted with fatty heart, angina pectoris, with its terrible pain, palpitation, and other affections both functional and organic.

It is stated by good authority that one-fifth of all the boys examined for the United States Navy fail to pass, from heart disease caused by the use of tobacco in some form. The cigarette is responsible for many failures to pass.

Readers of the early numbers of the People's Health Journal will recognize the following quotation, which well illustrates the disturbing effects of tobacco upon the heart of one apparently in good health:—

“One evening recently a gentleman of fine physical development, and to all outward appearances in perfect health, remarked, ‘I have smoked twenty cigars to-day.’ ‘Do you not feel some ill effects from it?’ the writer inquired. ‘No, sir,’ was the prompt reply; ‘not a particle; I feel splendid; I am as sound as a dollar.’ ‘Let us time your pulse,’ said we. Exactly one hundred and eight per minute! The heart was making thirty-six beats per minute more than it should; or, in other words, was beating too rapidly by fifty per cent. It does not take much of a mathematician to figure out the final result of such an excessive action of the heart.”

It is a lamentable fact that many otherwise well-informed physicians are not fully aware of the very great injury that the heart may sustain through the use of tobacco, as the following case, reported some years ago by Dr. Corson, of New York, well shows.

A young man at the age of seventeen began the use of tobacco, and as he thought so much spitting would injure his lungs, he contracted the habit of swallowing the juice. For some years he suffered “from gnawing, capricious appetite, nausea, vomiting of meals, emaciation, nervousness, and palpitation of the heart.”

The patient thus describes his suffering: “Seven years thus miserably passed, when one day after dinner I was suddenly seized with intense pain in the chest, gasping for breath, and a sensation as if a crowbar were pressed tightly from the right breast to the left, till it came and twisted in a knot round the heart, which now stopped deathly still for a minute, and then leaped like a dozen frogs. After two hours of death-like suffering the attack ceased, and I found that ever after my heart missed every fourth beat.”

These attacks continued in a milder and shorter form for the next twenty-seven years, the paroxysms sometimes being as often as two or three times in twelve hours. Neither the patient nor his physician seem to have had the slightest idea that tobacco was the cause of this long-continued suffering; but having become disgusted at the thought of being a slave to a degrading habit—the sufferer altogether quit the use of the captivating drug.

In a month the paroxysms had nearly ceased, and not long after they disappeared never to return. He soon became transformed from an emaciated invalid to a stout, healthy man. Here was a case of angina pectoris, of twenty-seven years' duration, directly caused by tobacco. He had suffered, more or less, from the use of tobacco for thirty-three years. Had his physician understood the real cause of the malady, he might have given advice that, perhaps, would have led to the abandonment of the use of the weed, and thus the twenty-seven long years of suffering might have been averted.—Thomas G. Roberts, M. D., in People's Health Journal.