Health and Temperance by Christian at Work

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 24, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 12.

Health and Temperance.

By Christian at Work

CIGARETTE SMOKING.

ONE of the saddest, and at the same time most exasperating sights witnessed nowadays at the watering-places, is the habit of cigarette smoking by half-grown boys and silly young girls. It is utterly senseless in itself, besides being deeply injurious to the health of immature youth. It will probably avail little, however, to point out the poisonous, debilitating, and disease-producing effects of these vile cigarettes, which, as exposed for sale in the market, are made often of stubs of cigars literally picked from the gutters, and from the refuse matter of tobacco manufactories. Such effects are sneered at by the reckless youngster who thinks it manly to twine a smoke-wreath around his lofty head. It would be useless to remind him that Dr. Douglas said with all the authority of a medical man, who knows whereof he speaks, that General Grant's cancer was caused by smoking, or of other conspicuous cases. Catelain, the famous caterer of Paris, died of smoker's cancer, and so did four learned men, in the course of a few years, who were connected with a theological seminary not a hundred miles from this city. Dr. Loza describes many cases within his own knowledge and practice caused by smoking. Dr. Barker, in the British Medical Journal, gives an account of seventy-five cases of epithelioma, and in only one case of the seventy-five was there an inherited predisposition to cancer. Almost every physician has had occasion to cut out lip cancers which came as the result of drawing nicotine through a pipe-stem. But if 100,000 cases of the direst agony, followed by the most wretched of deaths, could be marshaled to enforce the reasonable exhortation against the cigarette, it would do nothing to deter the brainless and pert young miss who is determined to play the role of a cigarette heroine. The only weapon against this outrage on human nature is to ridicule it. Voltaire said that in France ridicule kills; it is so in America as well. When common sense was impotent against the vagaries and eccentricities and absurd ideals of knight-errantry, Cervantes set all the world to laughing at them by picturing the follies of Don Quixote. It is time to bring the laugh and the sneer united against this intolerable nuisance of cigarette smoking by young men—and especially by young women.—Christian at Work.