Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From 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."
From Chapter 8: Cowper's aversion from tobacco could not have been very strong, for he encouraged his friend to smoke in the famous Summer House at Olney, which was the poet's outdoor study. Bull smoked Orinoco tobacco, which he carried in one of the tobacco-boxes, which in those days were much more commonly used than pouches, and this box on one occasion he accidentally left behind him at Olney. Cowper returned it to him with the well-known rhymed epistle dated June 22, 1782, and beginning: If reading verse be your delight, 'Tis mine as much, or more, to write; But what we would, so weak is man, Lies oft remote from what we can.
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