Tobacco warningIn 1878, warning against the use of tobacco, the senior physician to the Metropolitan Free Hospital wrote in The Times newspaper in Britain. Dr. Charles Drysdale pointed to “the enormous consumption of tobacco in all European states.” He estimated that £15,000,000 was spent annually in Great Britain on tobacco. He concluded “that the use of tobacco is one of the most evident of all the retrograde influences of our time.” Years earlier, in 1864, he had published in Med. Circular results of excessive use, such as cases of jaundice in healthy young men smoking 3/4-oz daily, and a young man who smoked 1/2-oz daily having “most distressing palpitation of the heart.” In 1875, he wrote a booklet, Tobacco and the Diseases It Produces. |
