Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

Another tract which may be classed with Venner's "Treatise" was the "Nepenthes or the Vertues of tobacco," by Dr. William Barclay, which was published at Edinburgh in 1614. This is sometimes referred to and quoted, as by Fairholt, as if it were a whole-hearted defence of tobacco-taking. But Barclay enlarges mainly on the medicinal virtues of the herb. "If Tabacco," he says, "were used physically and with discretion there were no medicament in the worlde comparable to it"; and again: "In Tabacco there is nothing which is not medicine, the root, the stalke, the leaves, the seeds, the smoake, the ashes." The doctor gives sundry directions for administering tobacco—"to be used in infusion, in decoction, in substance, in smoke, in salt." But Barclay clearly does not sympathize with its indiscriminate use for pleasure. "As concerning the smoke," he says, "it may be taken more frequently, and for the said effects, but always fasting, and with emptie stomack, not as the English abusers do, which make a smoke-boxe of their skull, more fit to be carried under his arme that selleth at Paris dunoir a noircir to blacke mens shooes then to carie the braine of him that can not walke, can not ryde except the Tabacco Pype be in his mouth." He goes on to say that he was once in company with an English merchant in Normandy—"betweene Rowen and New-haven"—who was a merry fellow, but was constantly wanting a coal to kindle his tobacco. "The Frenchman wondered and I laughed at his intemperancie."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

The ladies who so surprised Dickens were English and American, but at the period in question-the early 'forties of the last century-one of the freaks of fashion at Paris was the giving of luncheon parties for ladies only, at which cigars were handed round.

The first hints of feminine smoking in England may be traced, like so many other changes in fashion, in the pages of Punch. In 1851, steady-going folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived outburst of "bloomerism," imported from the United States. Of course it was at once suggested that women who would go so far as to imitate masculine attire and to emancipate themselves from the usual conventions of feminine dress, would naturally seek to imitate men in other ways also. Leech had a picture of "A Quiet Smoke" in Punch, which depicted five ladies in short wide skirts and "bloomers" in a tobacconist's shop, two smoking cigars and one a pipe, while "one of the inferior animals" behind the counter was selling tobacco. But this was satire and hardly had much relation to fact.

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