The
suspicion that smoking tobacco caused damage to the user’s heart and
lungs dates back centuries. In 1604, King James I of Great
Britain had remarked in his “Counterblaste to Tobacco” that smoking
was “dangerous to the lungs.” In 1867, George William Curtis,
the editor of
Harper’s Weekly,
who himself had stopped smoking in the 1850s, wrote three
commentaries warning of health hazards from using tobacco.
The first editorial, published
in the February 2 issue, was simply entitled “Tobacco.”
In it, Curtis argued against the evidence and logic of those who
claimed that tobacco use neither lessened longevity nor undermined
health. The introduction of tobacco into the human body
resulted, he said, in a tolerance allowing increased use and, thus,
greater absorption of its poisonous substances. The editor
asserted that there were enough medical cases to conclude, “that the
very prevalent use of tobacco is among the prominent causes of
ill-health and positive [i.e., manifest] disease.” He
identified the nervous system and digestion as the most obvious
targets of the product’s negative effects. Anticipating
scientific studies in the late-twentieth century, Curtis observed
that health could be regained in some cases when the tobacco habit
was curtailed. His example of a clergyman who quit smoking
clearly presented the symptoms of addiction, withdrawal, and
recovery.
In the second editorial on
August 3, 1867, Curtis primarily discussed the “Capacity
of the Human Lungs”
by describing in some detail how they look and function. But
the moral appeared in the last paragraph, which began dramatically:
“No organs of our system are more abused.” Among the sources
of the harm, he prominently listed “the inhalation of tobacco
smoke,” all of which “sweeps off unnumbered thousands who might have
lived to threescore and ten.”
Into the early-twentieth
century, many anti-tobacco advocates claimed that the habit resulted
in a laundry list of maladies. However, in his final editorial
on the topic on September 14, 1867, Curtis demonstrated remarkable
foresight by pinpointing what scientific studies a century later
would identify as the three major health hazards of tobacco use:
cancer, lung disease, and heart disease.
In uncharacteristically pessimistic terms, he deplored the worldwide
spread of the habit while “people die prematurely of palsy of the
heart, cancerous stomach, and diseased lungs…”
An 1870 study by a Dr.
Sigmund concluded that frequent smoking increased the likelihood and
severity of maladies affecting the mouth, nose, and throat. A
news item in the June 5, 1875 issue of
Harper’s Weekly
informed readers that a Dr. Krauss found tobacco smoke to “contain
a large quantity of carbonic oxide”
[i.e., carbon monoxide]. He concluded that the poisonous gas
was responsible for lung damage in smokers and sickness in
first-time users. Scientific studies in the late-twentieth
century would find that the carbon monoxide produced in tobacco
smoke restricts the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, which is needed
by the body’s tissues. In that way, the poisonous gas inhaled
by smokers contributes to arterial disease and coronary heart
disease.
In 1897, a Dr. Mendelssohn
reported a 60% greater occurrence of respiratory disorders in
smokers than nonsmokers, and a somewhat higher incidence in those
who regularly inhaled from those smokers who did not. During
the 1930s-1950s, medical research associated smoking with lung
cancer, bronchitis, emphysema, and coronary heart disease. In
1964, the Report of the U.S. Surgeon General identified cigarette
smoking as the leading cause of chronic bronchitis, and reported a
statistical correlation between smoking and emphysema, as well as
smoking and heart disease. In 1984, the Report of the U.S.
Surgeon General named cigarette smoking as a primary cause of
chronic obstructive lung disease, and found that stopping the habit
was beneficial. |