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Tobacco smoking, using both pipes and cigars, was common to many Native American cultures. It is depicted in the art of the Classic-era Maya civilization about 1,500 years ago. The Mayans smoked tobacco and also mixed it with lime and chewed it in a snuff-like substance. Among the Mayans tobacco was used as an all-purpose medicine, and was widely believed to have magical powers, being used in divinations and talismans. It was also burned as a sacrifice to the gods; a tobacco gourd was worn as a badge by midwives.
Modern history
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus was given "certain dry leaves" by the Arawaks, but threw them away. Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres were the first Europeans to observe smoking, and Jerez also became the first recorded smoker outside the Americas. His neighbours in Spain were so frightened by the smoke billowing from his mouth and nostrils that they alerted the Spanish Inquisition, and Jerez was imprisoned for seven years. By the time he was released, smoking had become fashionable in Spain. In 1497 Ramon Pane who had been on the second voyage of Columbus describes the native use of tobacco in De Insularium Ribitus. Columbus in 1498 named the island of Tobago after the native tobacco pipe. Throughout the 16th century, the habit of smoking spread mainly among sailors. It was introduced to England by the crew of Sir John Hawkins in the 1560s. In 1559, Francisco Hernandez de Toledo introduced the plant to the court of Philippe II where it was at first only grown as an ornamental plant. Tobacco made an impact on European society only from the 1580s; in England, some returning Virginia colonists in 1586 caused a sensation by smoking tobacco from pipes. The tobacco plant in Elizabethan England was known as sotweed. The habit caught on, and in 1604, James I wrote his A Counterblaste to Tobacco, and multiplied import tax on tobacco by a factor of 40. Similarly, an imperial edict in 1610 prohibited the use and cultivation of tobacco in China, where, from 1638, smokers could be punished by decapitation. During the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), smoking Landsknechts spread tobacco use among the rural population of the European continent: records of smoking in Sweden date to 1630 and in Austria to 1650. In 1642, Urban VIII issued a papal bull against smoking in churches. In 1657, smoking was prohibited in Switzerland.
The cigar became immensely popular in England in the late 1820s. The cigarette appeared in 1828 in Spain, and enjoyed immediate success. The protagonist of Bizet's Carmen of 1845 is a girl working in a cigarette factory. But the cigarette remained less popular than the cigar or pipe until the early 20th century in most of Europe, when cheap mechanically made cigarettes became common. Queen Victoria hated tobacco, but after her death, in 1901, her son and successor Edward VII gathered his friends in a large drawing room at Buckingham Palace and entered with a lit cigar in his hand, announcing "Gentlemen, you may smoke", initiating the upper class British smoking room. Ironically, his grandson, King George VI (Queen Elizabeth's father) would later die at age 56 of lung cancer.
Tobacco products were included in military rations during World War I. After the war, cigarette smoking was portrayed in advertising as part of a glamorous carefree lifestyle, and became socially acceptable for women. In the 1930s Nazi medical and military leaders became concerned that tobacco might prove a hazard to human health, concluding that the "extraordinary rise in tobacco use" was "the single most important cause of the rising incidence of lung cancer," the first scientists to confirm this link. From 1933 to 1945 Germany had the world's strongest anti-smoking movement, with the full support of Adolf Hitler, who disapproved of smoking. He characterised tobacco as "the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man for having been given hard liquor." He also associated smoking, along with drinking, as affects of liberal decadence. Nazi propagandists even had a campaign to discourage smoking during pregnancy, which was medically progressive for its time. Germany's defeat in 1945 meant that its aggressive anti-tobacco movement declined. Hitler and the campaigners behind the movement were dead, had been silenced, or were later executed for crimes against humanity. Much of the science on the dangers of tobacco had been gathered through brutal experimentation on concentration camp prisoners. In the post-World War II period, German physician Knut-Olaf Haustein was known for his work studying the effects of tobacco smoking.
In the United States biologist Raymond Pearl had demonstrated the negative health affects of smoking tobacco as early as 1938. In the 1950s and 1960s, the medical community and government bodies, as well as Readers Digest magazine, began a campaign to reduce the degree of smoking by showing how it damaged public health. Filter-tip cigarettes, which reduce poisonous chemicals, were introduced and are now standard everywhere. Less potent brands were also introduced in the 1960s but did not satisfy smokers' cravings as well as traditional brands. The 1964 U.S. Surgeon General's Report, summarizing the findings of numerous medical research studies, was a major wake-up call, and led millions of Americans to quit, and tobacco commercials to be banned. In recent years tobacco smoking in many regions of the world has dramatically dropped, but remains extraordinarily high in regions such as the Asian Far East due to aggressive cigarette company marketing and lack of health education.
References
Bibliography
Further reading
- John C. Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History, New York University Press, 1993
- Iain Gately: La Diva Nicotina. The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World (2001) (ISBN 0-7432-0812-9).
- Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence, Routledge, London, 1993
- David Harley, "'The Beginnings of the Tobacco Controversy: Puritanism, James I, and the Royal Physicians'", Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 67, Spring 1993, pp. 28-50
- David Krough, Smoking: The Artificial Passion (1992) (ISBN 0-7167-2347-6).
- Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 1996, on smoking in U.S.
- Robin Walker, Under Fire: A History of Tobacco Smoking in Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, 1984.
- Ian Tyrrell;Deadly Enemies: Tobacco and Its Opponents in Australia (1999)