Tobacco, by J. C. Jackson, M. D.

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 6, 1863

Tobacco,

By J. C. Jackson, M. D.

And its Effects upon the Health and Character of those who Use it.

A LECTURE, BY J. C. JACKSON, M. D.

WITHIN the last twenty-five years the use of tobacco with our people has increased thirty-three and a third per cent. over the ratio of the increase of population. At first thought it may be difficult for the man of reason and reflection to account for this, knowing, as he well does, that great efforts have been put forth in the direction of inducing people to abandon the use of spirituous liquors. Naturally enough he might think that a man who was quickened in his moral sense in respect to the unhealthfulness of the use of ardent spirits would also, under the same train of reflection, be induced to give up or to abstain from the use of tobacco. Paradoxical as it may appear, however, the fact of the increase of the use of tobacco, in proportion to the whole population since the Temperance reformation began, is well established. This fact can be and has been demonstrated in various ways. Statistics showing the quantity used in this country, settle the question decidedly, and the philanthropist, however glad he might be to doubt, cannot relieve himself from the evidence which is easily to be obtained on the subject.

As a physician, I have for a long time entertained the opinion that the use of tobacco by our people is far more deleterious in its effects upon their health than is the use of alcoholic drinks; but as no one at once gets at the truth in detail, or so as to feel himself comprehensively the master of it in all its relations, and to be aware of all its bearings, it is only within a few years that I have settled myself down thoroughly in the conviction that no habit of the American people is so destructive to their physical vigor and their moral character as that of the use of tobacco.

Tobacco may be justly classed as one of the most powerful poisons known to man. By Toxicologists, or those who study the nature and effects of poisons upon living organisms, it is classed as such, but ranks as a depressant, rather than an excitant. There is no other poison which as a depressant is considered more efficient. Experiments have been made in various ways to decide this point, and with the physician there is no longer any doubt in regard to it. Unlike the diffusible stimulants it lowers the action of the heart and nervous system, whenever it is taken into the circulation; and unless the person using it has become habituated to it, so that his nervous forces are related by terms of accommodation to its presence in the blood, the effects are seen in a very marked and powerful degree.

In connection with my associates in the management of a Health Institution, and through our correspondence with persons outside of our Establishment with reference to the breaking up of their use of tobacco, I have had opportunities to study its effects upon a great many people. Over two thousand persons have come under my professional supervision in our Institution who, at the time of placing themselves in our hands with a view to their restoration to health, were in the use of this poison. Besides these, through our correspondence we have given professional advice, with a view to their abandonment of it, to over three thousand persons who were in its daily use. How many others have been influenced against its use by articles which I have written upon its deleterious effects on health and morals, I do not know; but any one can see that opportunities sufficiently large for making examination into its effects have been mine, to justify me in generalizing and in drawing conclusions upon which I may safely rest.

Unlike stimulants, as I have said above, tobacco acts as a depressant. Given to a person unused to it, and in health, it affects the nervous system in a way most remarkable. To a new beginner who takes it, either in the form of chewing or smoking, there is manifested very distressing sickness at the stomach, with such fullness of the head as not unfrequently to be attended with ringing in the ears, partial loss of sight, partial delirium, violent contraction of the muscles of the throat, great difficulty of breathing, twitching of the muscles of the body at large, and partial loss of sensibility in the lower extremities and tips of the fingers, together with great relaxation of the lower bowels, partial paralysis of all the sphincter muscles, and especially of the large intestine. These conditions are not all seen in each case, but in every case, a sufficient number of them to startle any physician who for the first time should become witness to their manifestation. Personally I have never known of, nor have I seen a man, woman or boy, in whom these effects of tobacco, in their first attempts to use it, were not more or less visible. I doubt whether there ever lived a human being who, upon taking into his mouth the first chew, or upon smoking the first pipe of tobacco, or the first cigar, was not made so abnormal in all his vital manifestations as to exhibit in good degree the morbid conditions which I have described above. The strong and the weak, the old and the young, the male and the female, are measurably affected, when the first attempt at use of it is made. In organisms largely endowed with nervous temperament, hyper-sensibility to the presence of the poison in the circulation is shown. In instances not a few has it come to my knowledge that such persons have found it impossible, for a long time after commencing its use, to indulge without decidedly unpleasant sensations. Notwithstanding these, they have persevered—some for weeks, others for months, others still for years—in its use, being made sick more or less severely by such successive indulgence, till at length Nature, having been for a long time outraged, adjusts herself thereto, and thenceforward they are free from any of the original morbid manifestations, unless they attempt to abandon it, when these reappear with severity. Persons of lymphatic temperament, of large build, in whom the circulation is sluggish, whose nervous systems act vigorously only under exigency, suffer not as much in the incipient stages, nor are the morbid sensations as long continued as of those of the temperament just before described; but no person is entirely exempt from the reactions which the Vital Forces set up against the presence of this poison in the blood.

One would reasonably infer that a substance producing such effects in the beginning of its use, would be abandoned; and I am disposed to think that it would be, were not its use so general as to have become privileged, and to have secured for itself some prescriptive rights, lying beyond the reach of mere convention. Vices, like virtues, take on protectionist arrangements, and, if they can be lifted into the dignity of a fashion, are more secure from that point than from any other which they could occupy. Nothing with mankind is so difficult to reach as a vicious indulgence or habit, guarded and guaranteed by all those attractions which make it a fashion. There are very coarse vices existing among men which are approachable, and which, without any great difficulty, are reached and abolished. But humiliating as it is, I think it is nevertheless true, that just to the degree that a vice has for its existence no other justification than the indulgence of more animal propensity, and is therefore beyond the pale of reason, is it difficult to reach and overthrow it, provided always that it has secured to itself such general assent as to place before it for its protection the social forces, and to make it fashionable. I know this was true in my own case when trying to abandon the use of tobacco. I know also that it has been the case with hundreds, and, for that matter, with thousands with whom I have held earnest conversations in regard to their attempt at its disuse. It seems to me that no person could have suffered severer physical distress than I suffered when I commenced the use of tobacco. No motive of which I now can conceive as possibly influencing my conduct could have been sufficiently forcible to have kept my determination good to be able to chew and smoke tobacco so as not to be made sick, other than that which bound me, and in larger or lesser degree binds every man to do what he sees others doing, and by the doing of which

confidence among their fellows than otherwise they would possess.

It may not be unprofitable to the reader to give a view of the motives which led me to become a chewer and smoker of tobacco. At the time I commenced its use I was only eleven years old. My father—an Allopathic physician, distinguished in his day and in his locality for his professional success—used it as far back as I have any remembrance of him. The minister in our place, who was a Presbyterian clergyman, and a very good man, is associated in my mind with his indulgences in this direction, on all those social occasions which brought him to my father's house, as a guest. The editor of our newspaper, who has since risen to be one of the most influential and powerful leaders of a political party which this State has ever had, was seen by me during the period he lived in my native town as regularly smoking his pipe as he went to his boarding-house to obtain his meals. A young lawyer who afterwards came to be a very distinguished member of the Bar in central New York, though now for many years dead, was always seen in his office with a pipe in his mouth. The deacons of the church to which my parents belonged were every one of them users of tobacco—and I think, as all the other gentlemen used it—in the form of chewing and smoking. My mother—a more remarkable woman, in many respects, than it has been my fortune ever to know, and of more than ordinary intellectual culture and womanly grace—was also a smoker. Our tavern-keeper, as good a fellow as ever kept an Inn, was never seen on his stoop of an afternoon when the shadows began to grow long, without a pipe in his mouth. My teachers in Latin and Greek—one of whom was a very learned man, and far and wide, in our sparsely-settled country, was known to be as wonderful in his way as Goldsmith's Village Schoolmaster—I never knew, except when he was eating, to be without a pipe or a quid of tobacco in his mouth, when he was out of bed. The gentleman who followed him as my teacher, a graduate of one of the colleges in my native State, and now a learned judge in one of the counties in Western New York, always had a spittoon in his school-room, and furnished me the first opportunity which I ever had of seeing an article of that description made out of earthen ware. On sunshine days, or on rainy, misty afternoons, when there was less activity for each of these and kindred gentlemen in our little village, or on occasions when there was some great news slowly making its way from the centers of intelligence to our remote village, these men would assemble on the stoop of our village tavern to talk and chat and make themselves socially agreeable. I have counted twenty of them at one time sitting in chairs, or standing against the stoop-posts, or lounging so as to secure to themselves easy positions, every one of them smoking while the chatting went on. Below them, and standing by ready to put on to their feet any shoes which Death might make vacant, were the young men of our town—the law-students, the young teachers, the mechanic's apprentices, in their various ranks and grades,—all or nearly all of whom were in the use of tobacco or were trying to learn to use it. Slowly there grew up in my mind a consciousness that in some way, shape or manner, there were connected with the use of tobacco, passports to higher social relations and to more manly conditions than it was possible to obtain without the use of it. It became a serious matter, therefore, with me to be able to use it. Though a child in years, my father had educated me upon the plan of never having me suck. I never knew but little of the sports of childhood—of its sunny, pleasant hours. I never ran up and down any of its hard-beaten paths. As soon as I was able to realize the responsibility of my life in the feeblest degree, manhood was the state which was always presented to me for my consideration, and every motive that could be brought to bear upon me to its attainment, was made effective. To be a man, not a child; to be a man, not a boy; to be a man, not a youth; was represented as the chief good after which I was to seek. Of course my mind became preternaturally active and morbidly sensitive in respect to the accomplishment of this great object, and as I saw that social position had its symbols and types of recognition, and among these was the use of tobacco, either

in the form of chewing or smoking, or more generally both, I determined to bridge the chasm which separated me from the manly, and to become, let what would happen to me, one of the initiated.

It was as beautiful a Sabbath morning in June as ever the sun shone upon in our clime, when I resolved, with all the fervor and energy characterizing my nature, to make the attempt. My father had a hired man of middle age who himself was a great tobacco chewer, never using it in any other form. He advised me to commence by chewing, gave me directions about it, telling me what I must expect, announcing to me that I should be deadly sick, but that it would not last a great while, and that when I got over it, I must immediately take another chew into my mouth, which would make me even sicker than before, and after this sickness passed away I should have little or no further trouble.

Our house was a modest farm-house, facing the public street, and shaded by beautiful locust trees. In front of the door was a large flat stone, and just before the threshold on either side stood two locust trees shading the doorway. When our family had all gone to church, sitting down upon that stone and looking up through the opening spaces of the trees overhead, I introduced this poison into my veins. So far as I ever had consciousness of my conditions, they are as vivid to me now as they were on that morning, and no language of which I am the owner can begin to describe the terrible suffering through which, on that blessed Sabbath day, I passed. No efforts that I have ever since made to secure to myself position with my fellows, to work out for myself a manly character, which should challenge the public confidence, have been marked by a more decided self-abnegation or greater sublimity of spiritual feeling than I exhibited on that day. I had not only no thoughts of educating myself into a vicious habit, but on the other hand I earnestly sought to possess myself of a means of becoming, though young, more respected and honored by every person whose respect and good will I was desirous to obtain. I do not believe that my heart ever went out in more earnest devotion, nor that I ever more sincerely prayed to Heaven to help me succeed in any effort that I was about to enter upon, than I did on that occasion. In five minutes my saliva had mingled with the tobacco which I had put into my mouth, and I began to be blind. In a little while after I seemed to be thrown out into illimitable space, driven on by Forces of which I had no knowledge, but which were omnipotent, and for the better part of a lifetime, as it then seemed, I drifted hither and thither, without the least self-control. I think no human being was ever more thoroughly intoxicated than I was. While I retained in extreme measure consciousness of what passed on the occasion, there were no relations to personal existence which at the time were not, and even since have not been largely chaotic. How long in fact I was in that condition I do not know but probably not a great while, when insensibility ensued, and I lay down upon the flag-stone, and there remained until, at length, under the reaction of the Vital Forces, consciousness returned, and I looked about and gradually found where I was.

The battle was half fought. I immediately opened my mouth and took another chew, when blindness and deafness ensued, twitching of the muscles, and deadly sickness, with severe prostration, followed, and I again became insensible. It was ten o'clock when I first seated myself and entered upon my matriculation; it was half-past two o'clock when I came out of the last fit of insensibility. Dragging myself into the house by my hands, as a person would whose lower limbs had suddenly become paralyzed, I reached our pantry, and there found some cold coffee which had been set aside from breakfast, and of which I drank largely, after the directions of my father's hired man, previously given. Soon I became relieved from my great nervous and muscular depression and was able to get up. When our people returned from church I was in bed.

My father and mother came to see me, and I still retain clear and vivid impressions of how my father looked when he was called to my bedside by my mother's expressions of alarm. His entire wits were challenged to their uttermost in the matter of diagnosis. I heard him say to my mother that I was a very sick boy, and looked as if I had been poisoned; at any rate he never in his life saw such symptoms, and he should call for counsel. Immediately a man was dispatched for one of our village physicians, who, in consultation with my father, made out a prescription, to which I was subjected. I, who was devout in seeking means to pass from embryonist life to one of full proportion, was actually so affected in certain of my faculties by this poison, that I showed what I never had before shown, a resolute cunning and shrewdness, with a species of falsehood, that enabled me to succeed in misleading both my father and the physician whom he had called in to counsel, in respect to the real causes that had operated to place me in the conditions in which I was.

From that day commenced my trouble. The effect of this poison soon showed itself upon my general health in the production of congested brain, and subsequently in frequent torpid states of the liver, attended with severe mucous dyspepsia. A close student, shut up for the most part in rooms, pushed in my education by my teacher, I came to be an invalid. At twelve years old I showed such abnormalities of the nervous system as generally to excite the fears of my parents for my health, and to cause a wide-spread interest among medical men in respect to the peculiar phases of my disease. Sick as I was in body, I showed much more interesting phenomena in my mental manifestations. I became the subject of a double consciousness. I lived two lives, and far and wide in that region of country was I known as a remarkable somnambulist. No one could trust me to lie in bed or to fall asleep. I was more likely than not to get up, dress, or partly dress, and go anywhere and do all sorts of audacious things, with a coolness that was astonishing. As a matter of course I was made the subject and the victim of the severest drug medication. From that period of my life until I was nearly forty years of age was I all the while in the hands of physicians. I used tobacco for fourteen years. At nineteen years of age, my father having died, and responsibilities of more than ordinary character in the care of a mother and children younger than myself coming upon me, I married. Up to this time I had never thought that tobacco hurt me, nor did any medical man who knew that I used it—and I think one was never employed in my case, who was not made familiar with the fact—charge any of the morbid conditions which I showed to its use. However much I suffered by the drug poisons which my physicians gave me, the foundation of all my ill health is in my own mind, now clearly attributable to the use of tobacco. After having been married some few weeks I was rudely awakened from my silly and foolish dream-life to a consciousness that no slave was ever more thoroughly fettered than I was. My wife said to me, "I wish you could find it compatible with your ideas of propriety to give up the use of tobacco. Your breath is offensive to me." Instanter I said, "I will give it up. Nothing will afford me greater delight than to yield to your request. I will never use any more of it." So I entered upon my renunciation, and in twenty-four hours was as thoroughly conscious of my enslavement as one could be. Oh, how my nervous system suffered from the want of its daily draught of poison. The most violent headache and blindness, equal to that which was induced when I first indulged in the use of tobacco, came upon me, and such complete prostration of my physical powers, and depression of mind, with perturbation of spirit, I hope never during my mortal life to be called upon again to endure. My blood played through my veins as if it were in sea-surge. I saw all invisible things that were ugly and demon-like,—devils in the shape of old women, haggard and witch-like, danced round me. For the first time in my life I became sensible of the enslaving power of appetite. No force of will, or vigor of conscience were competent to my deliverance. My love for my wife, which usually absorbed all my self, faded away into nothingness. I saw nothing, thought of nothing, felt nothing but the overpowering desire for my tobacco. My moral sense became inert, and like a dog to his vomit, or a sow to her wallowing in the mire, I laid my manhood down, and for the time

being was transformed into a beast.

When, however, I had re-induced the habitual conditions of the nervous system by a return to my chewing and smoking, then came up more vividly than ever my loss of self-respect. A young, and newly married man, I saw that "to will was present with me, but how to do good I found not." A Christian by profession, I felt ashamed, and re-resolved to break the appetite. For the better part of three months I repeatedly made efforts for my deliverance, and each time fell into deeper disgrace than before. Ultimately my nature became so thoroughly demoralized by vain attempts to recover its dignity and poise, that the baser and meaner elements in it were uppermost, and, for a time, there are no words in the English language which so decidedly describe the impression I had of myself, as when I say that I had become a thorough Sneak.

Out of this deep of degradation I found no earthly hand to lift me. My wife I could not appeal to; for my very impotency had become my infamy. So there was no help in that direction. No friends came to my aid. Every body around me was using tobacco. At length,—and I scarcely know how it came to pass,—I bethought me of the Saviour. I remembered what the apostle James said, "If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to every man liberally, and upbraideth not." I was about to leave home on a journey. Beseeching the Saviour to help me recover my lost character, I went out into the darkness. I knew the nature of the conflict, and scarcely believed that I should succeed; but there came to me angels that strengthened me; and from that hour to this, the poison has not passed my lips. For four months, however, I was in a wild and dreary haze, staggering through mist and darkness; a dozen times a day tempted and well nigh overborne, but conquering for the hour and struggling on.

This aspect of my life is not an uncommon one. I never yet stated it before a public audience, when at the close of the meeting some person, and, oftener than otherwise, numerous persons have not come to me, and, seeking my confidence, said that I had told their own struggles in their efforts for deliverance. In my private confidential relations with persons who have sought my professional aid, hundreds on hundreds have related to me their experiences, some of which were much more graphic than my own. No gutter-drunkard, degraded from a loyal and true man into the condition of a besotted fool by the use of spirituous liquors has ever yet appeared on the public stage able to relate experience so fraught with degradation, loss of manliness and true dignity of character as hundreds of tobacco-drunkards in this country could show. The land is full of them,—boys, and grown-up men—who from one year's end to the other, never see one single conscious moment in which they are sober.

A great outcry has been made, within the last half century, against the degradation, the misery, the wretchedness resultant from the use of alcoholic liquors, and the protestations of the good and the true have not been beyond the necessities of the case; but where one man gets drunk in this country from ardent spirits, so that he is unfit to fulfill in their best estate the duties which Society and Government impose upon him, hundreds of men become thus incompetent to the performance of their social and public responsibilities from the use of tobacco. Where one boy has his nervous system so deranged by the use of ardent spirits as to render it impossible for him, however richly he may be intellectually and morally endowed, to reach high culture and larger acquisition of knowledge, to be wrought up into practical usefulness in the various relations and duties of life, fifty boys are rendered thus incompetent by the use of tobacco. I know of no sin among all the groups of sins, which crop out in our habits of living and curse us as a people, that for destructive vigor and ruinous accomplishment can compare with the use of tobacco. I am not fanatical. I do not exaggerate. I speak the truth in perfect soberness, and am sure that abundant testimony awaits me in the way of demonstration. Let us look a little into the thing, and see whether this view cannot be presented so as to commend itself to the consciousness and consciences of the good.

The human body, as living organism, is related to the expression of its vitalities after well-defined and determinate laws. When these have their free play and force, aided by proper external surroundings, and assisted by appropriate agencies, the body puts on its highest normal conditions, which we term health. Obstructions to the operation of these laws establish abnormal conditions of vitality, and this is disease—everywhere disease being nothing more, and nothing less, than vital force abnormally manifested. To place the body in certain conditions, and to subject it to the influence and effect of certain substances commonly denominated health-producing agents, is to secure to it the maintenance of its own powers, and thus cause it to show conditions of health. To subject it to the influence or effect of other agents, commonly denominated health-destroying or poisonous substances, is to force it to put on abnormal manifestations, and thus to make it show conditions of disease or death.

Among the substances which are not health-producing, but, on the contrary, health-destroying in their effects upon the organism when brought within its range of actions, alcohol, in its various forms and mixtures, and tobacco, in its various forms of preparation, rank high,—the one denominated a stimulant, the other a narcotic. The effect of the one upon the Vital Force is to increase the intensity of that force, to be followed, in time, by a corresponding depression. The direct effect of the other is to depress or to lessen the intensity of the Vital Force, to be followed, in time, by a corresponding excitement. Observation and experiment, which constitute in large degree the experience of professional men, have gone to establish the fact that certain substances are productive of specific effect, when these substances are placed within the range of action of the living forces of the human body.

These two poisons, therefore, stand over against each other. The one as a stimulant, or excitant, the other as a narcotic, or depressant, they work into each other's service—tobacco playing an original part in the destructive processes, and alcohol completing the ruin. Inquiry on a very large scale into the habits of men who have been known as habitual drinkers of alcoholic liquors, has settled the point conclusively that their appetites for strong drink were created and made clamorous by their previous use of tobacco, whose depressing effects upon their nervous system were such as to establish an instinctive or impulsive desire for the effect.

The Chaplain of the Auburn State's Prison, of the year 1854, I think, reports that out of over seven hundred male prisoners, six hundred were convicted of crime when under the direct or reflex influence of ardent spirits, and that a personal inquiry into the appetital habits of this class of persons brought out this startling and forcible truth, that five-sixths, or five hundred out of six hundred who were convicted for crime when partially or ravingly drunk, had from their own statements, the desire for strong drink awakened in them, so clamorously as to demand gratification at any rate from the depressing effects on their nervous systems of the use of tobacco. Outside of this statistical statement my own investigations in a much larger measure go to corroborate the truth of this record. I have never yet known, in all my inquiries or researches, a single man who was an habitual user of alcoholic drinks who was not a tobacco chewer. I have never heard of but one habitual drunkard who had never used tobacco.

Now, while it does not universally follow that every tobacco chewer uses ardent spirits, it will be found uniformly to be the fact that he does use some form of stimulant or excitant, as a substitute therefor. There are countervailing forces in operation in respect to the use of ardent spirits, such as the influence of Public Opinion against their use. A great many men and women, within the last thirty years, have had their moral sense very much exercised and educated in respect to the dangers arising from the habitual use of alcoholic liquors. But, while made sensible of the dangers in this respect, little or no instruction has been given in regard to the risks run from the use of intoxicating poisons of a different kind. Hence it will be found, upon close examination, that thousands of persons who have given up the use of alcoholic drinks have substituted in their places table beverages, or intoxicating drugs, to make up for their loss of their old accustomed stimulant. In proof of this, statistics go to show that Opium, outside of the use of it by the profession as a medicine, has increased in sale over 300 per cent. within the last twenty years. Lawyers, ministers, artists, doctors, students, men of letters, in many instances are in the daily use of opium. Others who do not use it have substituted for alcoholic beverages Hasheesh—Extract of Hemp, or Absinthe—Extract of Wormwood, whilst others use the strongest infusions of tea and coffee, drinking these twice, at least and very many of them three times a day, and along with these using the most stimulating condiments upon their food, and subjecting their nervous systems to such influence from the introduction of their stimuli and narcotic properties into their circulation as to make good in large measure for their total abstinence from alcoholic drinks. Thus related in their expressions of Nervous Force to the use of drinks and foods which serve in part as substitutes for alcoholic stimulus, they keep up the use of tobacco, and so demonstrate most manifestly the truth of the statement made above that while every or nearly every user of alcoholic drinks does use tobacco, in some of its forms, and while tobacco users do not all use alcoholic drinks, they do all of them use, in some form or other, such substitutes for alcoholic drinks as their sense of moral propriety and their regard for their characters in the public esteem will permit. To find a pure water-drinker who is a tobacco chewer, would be like finding a white blackbird. When you take away from the tobacco chewer or smoker all stimulating drinks or stimulating drugs or intoxicating substances, of every sort and kind, and place him where his foods and beverages shall answer simple nutrient and solvent purposes, tobacco no longer answers its chief purpose in the department of his sensations. Hence the readiness with which we cure tobacco-users. By taking away from them all stimulating substances in the shape of foods and drinks, in a little while a disrelish, then a dislike, then a disgust to tobacco springs up, and they find it no longer so desirable to smoke or to chew as when they were under dietetic and drinking indulgences.

(To be Continued.)