Congrès international contre l'abus du tabac / by C.R. Drysdale.

  • Drysdale, Charles R. (Charles Robert), 1829-1907.
Date:
1889?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Congrès international contre l'abus du tabac / by C.R. Drysdale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Goethe and Heine, the two most distinguished German writers did not smoke : Byron smoked : Victor Hugo did not, nor Alexandre Dumas. On the other hand Eugene Sue, George Sand ana Alfred de Musset were great smokers. But says. Dr. Fleury, Bryon was sickly and in despair, and his genius was not healthy. The great Goethe was an example of calm thought and detested Tobacco. He said “ I have a horror for three things, firstly Tobacco.” Michelet also was not a smoker and detested Tobacco. Victor Hugo considered that smoking changed thinking into dreaming. George Sand, it appears smoked “ enormously” and often made herself ill by the custom : and Musset smoked and drank hard. Emile Zola is said to have abandoned the habit of smoking at the advice of a physician for twelve years. Alexandre Dumas (fils') considers that Tobacco and Alcohol are the greatest foe to the intellect. M. Feuillet was made so ill by smoking he was forced to give up the habit - It blunts, he says, the faculties of the mind.” M. Jules Bar- bier also says he was nearly killed by the use of Tobacco and had been obliged to renounce it. In his second chapter, M. Fleury gives Medical testimony against Tobacco. Dr. Bouillard for example, in an essay published in 1886 in TEncephale, shows that children who smoke are brutalized by it, that the best scholars are those who do not make use of Tobacco : and that Tobacco lessens the power of attention and the memory. Most literary men who smoke suffer from dyspepsia, palpitations of the heart and neuralgia with more or less loss of memory. They are apt to lose their energy and become melancholy, indolent and irritable. Smoking encourages pessimism. Dr. Fleury then carefully analyses his own case which shows that he had seriously damaged his health by smoking and nearly brought on blindness by it. He had found it a very hard task to abandon the habit: and whilst weaning himself from it had suffered more that lie could describe. He gives a gloomy prognostic as to the future of French literature if the present mad desire for Tobacco should continue to dominate the present and future generation. In all this we thoroughly coincide with our able French brother medical observer, Dr. Fleury. We congratulate him in thus having tried to lessen the spread of one of the most menacing of all modern drawbacks to civilisation and health. On April 8th, 1888, there was a distribution of prizes giv at the Sorbonne by the Societe Contre 1 abus du Tabac. To bo had of the Editor of the Anti-Tobacco Journal, “ Clissold Lodge/ WELLCOME INSTITUTE i |r'P'*py Col!. weilVOmoc Coil. pam Na w Ah / & ^ J BO, Bethune Load Stoke Newington, N.