Welcome to the book Tobacco and the Diseases It Produces (1875), by Charles R. Drysdale, M.D., F.R.S. To go to the "Table of Contents" immediately, click here.
Tobacco pushers and their accessories conceal the breadth of tobacco effects, the enormity of the tobacco holocaust, and the long record of documentation.
The concealment process is called the "tobacco taboo." Other pertinent words are "censorship" and "disinformation."
Here is the text by Charles R. Drysdale, M.D., F.R.S. (1829-1907) of an early exposé (1875) of tobacco dangers. It cites facts you rarely ever see, due to the "tobacco taboo."
The phrase "tobacco taboo" is the term for the pro-tobacco censorship policy—to not report most facts about tobacco.
As you will see, information about the tobacco danger was already being circulated in 1875, 96 years before the famous 1964 Surgeon General Report. Be prepared.

Tobacco and the Diseases It Produces
by
Charles R. Drysdale, M.D., F.R.S.
(London: Baillière, Tindall, and Cox, 1875)

Table of Contents
Tobacco Chemicals1
Tobacco Effect on Vision2

The species of tobacco are closely related to henbane (hyoscyamus), to atropa belladonna, and to stramonium—poisonous plants used in medicine. Tobacco alone, of all the four, is scarcely ever employed medicinally at the present day, except perhaps, occasionally, in combination with stramonium, in spasmodic asthma. Its use as an injection has been abandoned, as too dangerous to life. It is largely used by some farmers for destroying vermin infesting sheep, and commonly also by gardeners for killing the insects upon their plants. Indeed, tobacco is one of the most virulent of all vegetable poisons.

The constituent part of tobacco, which makes it at once so agreeable and so dangerous to health, is nicotine, C10H14N2, a liquid alkaloid discovered, so recently as 1809, by a French chemist. So deadly a poison is nicotine, that one tenth of a grain of it will kill a middle-sized dog in three minutes, and as the percentage of nicotine in dry tobacco varies, from two per cent in Havana to about seven per cent in Virginia tobacco, it has been calculated that in a single cigar there is enough nicotine, if given pure, to kill two men; and in about a quarter of an ounce of tobacco, there may be as much as two grains of this very dangerous poison. A smuggler, mentioned by Namias to the Académie des Sciences, was dangerously poisoned by covering his naked skin with tobacco leaves, in order to escape paying duty. The great danger of chewing tobacco is thus at once evident.

Nicotine enters the body by the stomach, the lungs, and the skin; and its effects are uniform by whatever gate it enters.

The analyses made by Eulenberg and Vohl ("Ann. d'Hygiène," April, 1873, from "Vierteljahrsch für ger. Mod.") seem to controvert the old theory that the injurious effects of tobacco-smoking are due directly to the presence of nicotine in the smoke. They attribute them rather to the alkaloids produced by its decomposition, and which have many similar physiological properties. The smoke from tobacco, in pipes and cigars, was passed first through a solution of potassic hydrate, and then through one of dilute sulphuric acid. The former solution was found to contain a mixture of carbonic, hydrocyanic, sulphuric, acetic, formic, metacetonic, butyric, valeric, and carbolic acids, creosote, and several hydrocarbons. The acid solution contained rosolic acid, ammonia, traces of ethylamine and many of the pyridine bases, to the last of which the injurious action is due. The bases found were pyridine, C5H5N2, which is more abundant in pipe than in cigar smoke; picoline, C6H7N; lutidine, C7H9N; collidine, C8H11N; which is more abundant in cigar than in pipe smoke; parvoline, C9H13N; coridine, C10H15N; rubidine, C11H17N; and a residue corresponding to viridine, C12H19N. As will be seen, the most volatile of the bases, as pyridine, were most abundant in pipe-smoke, while the less volatile, as collidine, were most abundant in cigar-smoke.

The physiological action of these bases was not tested separately, but only that of a mixture of those which volatilize under 320° F., and of those which volatile between 320° F. and 482° F. Both of these sets of bases, like nicotine, produced contraction of the pupil, difficult respiration, general convulsions, and death; and, upon post mortem examination, the respiratory passages and lungs were found congested. They do not act as rapidly as nicotine. Those volatile at a low temperature were more active than those which were only volatile at a high temperature, which explains the fact that more tobacco can be smoked in the form of cigars than in a pipe.

The alkaloids arc soluble in the mucus of the mouth and air-passages: and thus smoke condensed and mingled with water is easily taken into the blood. Hence, when cigars or pipes are smoked, even out-of-doors, a notable quantity of poison is taken into the system. But, when smoking takes place in a small room, the air taken into the lungs also adds its poison to the fluids of the air-passages; and persons who remain in smoking-rooms, even if not themselves smoking, cannot escape a certain amount of poisoning. Women who wait in public bar-rooms and smoking-saloons. thouph not themselves smoking, cannot avoid the poisoning caused by inhaling smoke continually. Surely gallantry, if not common honesty, should suggest the practical inference from this fact."

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"The influence of tobacco upon the eyesight is well known. One of the symptoms produced in acute poisoning by tobacco is blindness; and chronic poisoning gives rise to similar symptoms. Mackenzie, of Glasgow, first noticed that male patients affected with one species of amaurosis were mostly great lovers of tobacco in some form.

"Sichel, of Paris, found some cases of blindness easily cured by cessation from the use of tobacco. Hutchinson narrated, before the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, thirty-seven cases of a species of amaurosis, where twenty-three of the patient were great smokers; and Wordsworth has confirmed these views of Mackenzie and Hutchinson. In one week I saw, in 1874, at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital, two cases of tobacco amaurosis in young men, neither of whom had attained the age of thirty. The first had chewed continually; and the other smoked the enormous quantity of one ounce of shag tobacco daily. Both were completely and irretrievably blind, from this dangerous habit. But weak sight is also commonly caused by snuffing, as well as by smoking and chewing. Tobacco amaurosis is much commoner now than it used to be."

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[In interim, pending completion of this site,
you can obtain this book via your local library.]

Other Books on Tobacco Effects
The Use and Abuse of Tobacco,
by Dr. John Lizars (1859)
Tobacco and Its Effects: Report
to the Wisconsin Board of Health
by G. F. Witter, M.D. (1881)
Click Here for Titles of Additional Books

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