The tobacco question : physiologically, chemically, botanically, and statistically considered / [William E.A. Axon].

  • Axon, William E. A. (William Edward Armytage), 1846-1913.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The tobacco question : physiologically, chemically, botanically, and statistically considered / [William E.A. Axon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/16 (page 14)
    excretory function is carried on with less celerity than usual, then is the time when the poison fixes its unrelenting fangs upon the vital principle. The amount which constitutes ‘ excess ’ cannot be ascertained. The quantity which nature is able to expel one day, she may be powerless to contend with on another. The counsel to smoke “ only in moderation ” is merely an exhorta¬ tion to try how much poison your constitution will bear, and as soon as ever you find that irreparable mischief has been done, then abandon the cause of it. Don’t upon any consideration shut the stable-door until the horse is stolen. And here we are suddenly brought face to face with the query—how many devotees of the weed are morally capable of breaking the iron fetters first woven round them in silk by the Siren habit ? Alcoholism may be more immediately disastrous than nicotism; but if we may credit the confessions of smokers in every man’s circle, no known narcotism is more enthralling. The man who finds himself bound hand and foot by the boy of ten or twenty years before, has something more serious to grapple with than the lack of moral courage which prompted the boy’s first cigar. Obsta ftrincipiis, is, in these things, ever the trumpet-toned cry of the wise. The manliness- of a nation must surely be in peril when the habits of her sons are fastened upon them by the heedless, reckless unwisdom of her youth, and when her men cry out for a solace to care and labour which is denied on all hands to the hardworked, harassed, constantly tried matron of the household—the weaker vessel! Going back to the question of juvenile smoking—if the adult consti¬ tution is unable to resist many of the worst effects of tobacco, the unformed frames of our youth are certain to suffer from it. It points directly to physical degeneration. There can be no hesitation about this matter. All medical men agree that all smoking by the young is ‘ excess,’ and is the sure forerunner of dyspeptic horrors.1 It is probably the greatest source of physical evil that the next generation will have to lament; for its witcheries are so seductive that the victim is willing to attribute to any other cause the mischief which it is working on his constitution. The common sequelae—the shaking hand and palpitating heart, the impaired digestion, the intermittent pulse,— are complacently ascribed to overwork, to the railway speed at which we live, to the incessant demands made upon our powers by a world which is “ too much with us for resistance to importunities that never cease.” Like father like son. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. The indulgence in tobacco by our youth and young men will affect not only themselves, but the future race of England. Fortunately for us it is a vice almost entirely masculine. If the daughters of England were to commence weakening their vital 1 Even the pro-tobacco journal admits that few things could be more pernicious for boys, growing youths, and persons of unformed constitution, than the use of tobacco in any of its forms.