The truth about the tobacco habit

A young friend of mine of the trouser-wearing male sex recently developed a pain in his stomach. He decided to wait it out. But it was an indecent as well as an insidious sort of pain and finally persisted so long that he was driven to consult a physician for moral support. The physician said, “Do you smoke?” My friend said “Yes.” The physician said, “That’s it, of course. Quit smoking. Three dollars, please.” My friend went away, quit smoking, and the pain persisted. He returned to the doctor. He was now given a little silver nitrate. He went away, but he came back again. By that time the physician was really angry. He said, “You’ve smoked yourself into a nice stomach ulcer, you have. I’ll have to operate. I hate to but I have to.” Just then buckwheat cakes and sausage made my friend violently ill one day and he deleted them from his diet. The pain left and has not yet played a return engagement. He smokes more than ever now, but he throws away longer butts.

Another friend of mine classifying in the male sex which so far tends to avoid wearing trousers--much--went to a physician. She complained of a rash which she said afflicted her all winter. Fortunately for the physician she smoked energetically. He therefore told her to quit and called the next patient. Since she knew that she smoked in summer as well as in winter she did not quit but, by chance, consulted a scientific nutrition investigator. There was no reason for this; she did it irrationally and by pure inadvertance. But he asked, “Do you eat anything in winter that you do not eat in summer?” And she at first said, “No,” because that is the most natural answer to make under the circumstances. Then later, after a half an hour’s cross-examination, she said, “Yes, oatmeal.” He said, “Try cutting that out for a while.” So she conquered this craving, but continued to smoke, and the rash departed for parts unknown. She had an idiosyncrasy for oatmeal proteins just as some people have for strawberry or egg proteins, and her rash was thus caused.

In a moment of more violent perversity I went not long ago to a lecture advocating ruthless war on tobacco. In spite of the success women have just had in smoking anti-cigarette reformers into comas, the speaker, Daniel H. Kress, M. D., was President of the Anti-Cigarette Alliance. Since he was a regular doctor in active practice I had a right to expect the presentation of a scientific case against tobacco.

This gentleman, who is personally one of the most delightful old souls in the world, actually completed his lecture without ever once citing a scientific authority, without once grounding upon irrefutable scientific fact and without departing widely from the most trivial and childish sort of argument from analogy. Thus he stated that a famous war hero did not smoke. Wilson did not smoke. Hughes does not smoke. The inmates of reform schools all smoke. Smokers are physically and mentally unsafe!

This may all be true for all I can prove to the contrary, but what of it? Many war heroes smoke. Grant certainly did. Small, defective and generally backward children normally spring from parents who underfeed them, who are themselves defective in heredity and who neglect to instruct their children in any essential matters. Can you prove that smoking alone either stunted them or put them in the reform school? You cannot. Criminals are predominantly religious according to their professions of faith. Did Christianity make them criminals? If smokers are mentally unsafe may I fervently declaim--God help research!

You hear it said that the children of smoking mothers are inferior. Are they? How can it be proven? As a matter of fact no scientific experiment could possibly be carried on to prove this, for statistics, being riddled by all sorts of idiosyncrasies and unknowns, are grossly unscientific. To prove it you might have the same mother have two children at separate times by the same father, smoking while she bore one and abstaining for the control child. But that would prove nothing. Each child is a unique individual arising from a unique chromosome mixture. The mother and father would of necessity be older in the one case than in the other. Nourishment and other environmental conditions would inevitably vary. The experiment is impossible. Yet until such an experiment becomes possible we are merely voicing opinions when we say that smoking causes inferior children. The actual cause may be any of a thousand other and extraneous factors.

When you consider how very often tobacco smoking is mentioned therapeutically and how universally it seems to be assumed that it is deleterious to health it is rather disconcerting to discover so little reliable scientific work to confirm this prevalent viewpoint. In fact practically no comprehensive, systematic work has been done by scientific research to prove that smoking is exceedingly harmful to the human system. Like so many other human preconceptions this assumption rests largely upon faith. To the acutely prejudiced non-smokers smoking seems so utterly perverse that it surely must be physically injurious.

A rational esthetic case could be made out against certain women smoking. True, the modern woman so sedulously apes the other sex that to deprive her of her cigarette is simply to deprive her gracelessly of her masculinity. We should never do that. But the spectacle of a really pretty, effeminate woman smoking is nevertheless an esthetic affront. Nothing the average man can do could make him look very much worse than he does naturally so even this slight objection does not apply bisexually.

But we have wandered, and I am of course at fault, having set out laudably to lead our thought procession. In my search of the scientific literature the nearest thing to an authority I came across was perhaps Sir Humphrey Rolleston, Baronet, K. C. B.; F. R. C. P. and M. D. of Cambridge, England, physician to King George V in his late 1928 illness. He discusses “The Medical Aspects of Tobacco” in such staid British medical journals as The Lancet and The Practitioner. He reviews every possible lesion that might spring from tobacco smoking, and they are many--quite as many indeed as may spring from over eating artichokes or drinking three gallons of well-water daily. He sets himself flatly against animal experimentation in this matter because this cannot possibly take idiosyncrasies into account, and reminds us that humans are both highly individualized and exceedingly complex.

Rolleston then remarks that cigarettes are less invidious than pipes or cigars because cigarette smoke is more air diluted. He finds a wide diversity of opinion as to the harmfulness of tobacco; he doubts that it ever affects the nervous system greatly and believes that coffee and tea usually produce the heart symptoms attributed to smoking and that a latent venereal disease accounts for much smoker’s cancer. He doubts also that dilation of the esophagus, dilation of the stomach, acid stomach and nervous dyspepsia are often due to tobacco while he commends the mildly laxative properties of a pipe after breakfast.

Finally our baronet says, and the medical journal sustains him editorially, that in view of the universality of the habit of tobacco smoking the rarity of the organic lesions that can be traced out as undoubtedly due to that habit, beyond all question, is little less than surprising. This, I should say, is the woodpile Ethiopian. It is one thing for a physician to lean back and say cut down on tobacco, coffee, fried stuff and pastry. It is quite another for him to prove scientifically that these indulgences have undeniably caused the patient’s present low physical estate.

D. T. Barry, F. R. C. S. and M. D. of the Physiological Department, University College, Cork, is not very far off when he writes: “The physiological effects of tobacco, as our present knowledge reveals them, are not sufficiently deleterious to counter-balance the benign influence of the drug in other respects. It may be abused, of course, but so may food, and this latter form of abuse is, in my opinion, responsible for greater evils than those resulting from the abuse of tobacco.”

In this connection another authority, Armstrong-Jones, remarks that tobacco smoking in moderation is not injurious to adults but is a valuable sedative. It contributes to calm thought and efficient mental functioning. Worst of all he casually remarks that cigarette smoking, preferably without a holder, is the least injurious form of tobacco indulgence. Even allowing for the fact that the gentleman has seen some of the less comely holders I have witnessed in my time, his statements give pause.

Of course Earp’s well-known studies at Antioch College, Ohio, did indicate that non-smokers showed an intellectual superiority over smokers, but whether these things were cause and effect or mere harmless concomitants who knows? Many very eminent intellectual giants smoked excessively. Perhaps they would have achieved absolute omnipotence or omniscience had they been non-smokers. Again, who knows?

It is significant that Earp’s non-smokers showed no physical superiority over his smokers; that is, it is interesting when you remember that the American university is an institution of athletic training wherein some intellectual education is offered to the feeble-bodied as a consolation prize. Intelligence tests are not affected by smoking, the non-smokers ranking just as high after smoking as before they had ever touched the vile weed. Finally, the correlation between the length of a student’s indulgence in tobacco and his scholarship is so negligible as to indicate that there can be no chronic cumulative poisoning from tobacco.

Laymen do not realize how difficult it is to trace a diseased condition to a specific cause even when bacteria abound, as is not the case in smoking. For instance certain bacteria so closely resemble each other that even experts are hard put to tell them apart. Diphtheria germs possess such a dead ringer. Real diphtheria cultures were once sent out to clinical laboratories along with other cultures containing no diphtheria germs, but germs so closely resembling them that the laboratories involved returned all sorts of results. Some reported that the actual diphtheria cultures contained no diptheria germs at all; others that some of the germs simulating diphtheria in appearance were positively the real thing. So a tooth or a tonsil may contain a germ so similar to those found at the seat of secondary infection that they are indistinguishable, yet the germ may be harmless in one case and virulent in the other.

Certainly it is unlikely that we carry virulent germs about in teeth and tonsils for long years. For one thing they get acclimated to us and can change their murderous habits. For another we get used to them. This organism of ours is an hospitable sort of thing. The body tends to adjust in neighborly fashion to germs upon long acquaintance, or familiarity breeds contempt, just as it adjusts to morphine, to opium, to over-eating, to the corrosive harness oils now sold as bootleg whiskey and to tobacco, of course. Perhaps long acquaintance ripens into real friendship and mutual aid.