The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 17, No. 490, May 21, 1831Various
History
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 17, No. 490, May 21, 1831
Various
Popular literature -- Great Britain -- Periodicals
The Surgeon-General of the Forces has recently made public his
belief, that never, till within the last twenty years, did he see so
many young men with pale faces and emaciated figures, and he attributes
the existence of the evil to the use of Cigars. The unreflecting
servility with which men adopt new and foreign practices, is fully
exemplified in the present case; for it is notorious that the practice
of cigar-smoking, the modern foppery from Regent-street to Cheapside and
Cornhill, was an importation of the Peninsular War; the imitation having
been begun by the Spaniards, whose models are what are usually called
the _savages_ of America. The dietetic mischief, and consequent
paleness of complexion and emaciation of muscle, which are attributable
to the use of cigars, belong, no doubt, to an injury inflicted, perhaps,
in more ways than one upon the aids and organs of digestion; nor is
that hypothesis at all inconsistent with what we hear from so many
cigar-smokers, namely, that their cigar is their dependence for
digestion! That, after having impaired the organ, or weakened its tone,
or dried up the salival menstruum, they should need a stimulant, even in
the very form of the bane which injures them, is only of a piece with
all that has been said of drinking, and especially of dram-drinking,
with which latter debauch, the debauch of cigar-smoking has the closest
possible alliance. We never pass one of those stifling rendezvous in the
metropolis--a cigar-shop, open till the latest hours--without mentally
classing it with the gin-shops, its only compeers!
Exclusive of the low habit of imitation, a dulness and feebleness of
understanding, an absence of intellectual resources, a vacuity of
thought is the great inducement to the use of this, as of all other
drugs, whether from the cigar-shop, or the snuff-shop, or the gin-shop,
or the wine-cellar; a truth by no means the less certain, because it
happens that men of the highest powers of mind are drawn into the vice,
and made to reduce themselves, by their adoption and dependence upon it,
to the lowest level of the vulgar; but, at the same time, it is not to
be denied, that a great support in defence of cigar-smoking is found in
the medical opinions sometimes advanced as to its salutary influence.
Now, if we admit, broadly and at once, that there may be times and
circumstances in which the inhaling the hot smoke of a powerful narcotic
drug is useful to the human body, must it follow that the habitual
resort to such a practice, and this under all circumstances, is useful
also, and even free from the most serious inconveniences?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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