Good Health | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 9, 1879

Good Health.

Senator Carpenter, of Wisconsin.

The Tribune correspondent encountered a personal friend of the senator, a few evenings since, who opened a conversation concerning him with the remark: "Matt Carpenter is sick, and likely to die. He is a very sick man indeed." The scribe ventured an inquiry into the nature of Mr. Carpenter's ailment, and received this as an answer:—

"I tell you that no man can smoke twenty Havana cigars a day, and keep up the practice, without encountering certain death. It is a hazardous thing to do, and Matt Carpenter is doing it. You observe the consequences. Matt is a slave to tobacco, and it is killing him slowly but surely. He has wasted so that his limbs have become emaciated to the semblance of pipe-stems. They call it rheumatism. Bah! it is tobacco, and nothing else, that has wasted him away to this extent, and will continue the work of destruction until death steps in and claims another victim. Matt Carpenter's ailment can be traced directly to the inordinate use of tobacco. I know this because I have read all of the best authorities upon the subject, and am therefore thoroughly conversant with the deleterious effects of the weed, at least theoretically. Tobacco possesses an insidious and destructive power second only to that of opium. When it strikes a victim it is sure death. Matt Carpenter, with all his great brain, does not know this, for the simple reason that he has not taken the pains to inform himself. He is slowly wasting away, and, not knowing the cause, keeps on smoking. He is killing himself with tobacco, and his physicians, I fear, keep him in ignorance of the real cause of his physical disability. The condition of Matt Carpenter, as the result of his fondness for tobacco, is a source of the most sincere regret to me, and that is the excuse I have to offer for speaking to you on the subject."—Chicago Tribune.

Schuyler Colfax came near to killing himself the same way, but fortunately saw his danger and had manhood enough to break away from his slavery.