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Show Diseases Die to Smoking. (From the Chicago Tribune.) "It's a bad habit," admits the smoker to his friend who asks- With reference to his pipe, cigar or his cigarette-. "If I ever catch you with tobacco in your mouth," says this same man to his son, taking his own cigar out of his mouth for emphasis, "I'll take all the hide off your back!" But, according to a medical expert, this man, neither as friend nor father, conveys a shadow of the seriousness of his vice to either friend or son.1 He does not know it himself, says the physician, phy-sician, and, more than that, the doctor says that not even the profession ap-.preciates ap-.preciates the serious consequences that are inseparably connected with the smoking habit. , "It is a queer situation," he pays; "while every authority is agreed that the use of tobacco is most harmful to a young person, there are physicians who will even prescribe it to a man as a sedative. And it is a soothing influence in-fluence for just so far as its use-as a drug makes tolerable; but one pipe too many makes it a source of irritability and nervous excitement. "Look at it as a poison. Every pipe, which has been used half a dozen times has enough nicotine in it to kill the smoker several times over. That it has not killed him is due to the disposition of the poison to stick to the pipe. But not all of this does so. How, then about its unquestioned influence upon the system? "Again, as to toljaeeo, there Is the unquestioned story of the man - who stole a bunch of tobacco leaves from a Havana dock, secreting them under his clothes next the skin. He went on with his work, perspiring freely, and suddenly sud-denly fell unconscious to the floor. Treating him first for sunstroke, the man's plight was discovered, but not till he had nearly lost his life. There are other stories sufficiently authenticated showing how a man who rubbed tobacco decoctions over bis body for a skin disease was nearly killed by the poison; of the mother who rubbed tobacco ointment on her child's head and face, causing the. little one's death; and of the man who died from swallowing an accidental dose of tobacco to-bacco water. 1 "Probably every pipe that has been used half a dozen times contains a dose of poison sufficient to kill the smoker in a few minutes.' ' Fortunately, it stays in the pipe as a rule. But most of us get a taste of what's there now and again. "In one case a man got a particularly lare-e nnantitv of this nnisnnrms -inino into his mouth. In a few seconds he fell, unconscious, and but for the presence pres-ence of a doctor he would inevitably have died. As it was. his life hung in the balance for a long time, but was ultimately saved. "Even animals are affected in a severe se-vere manner by tobacco. A calf washed -with a tobacco infusion, as a remedy for some disease, died in a few hours. Dr. Murray filled three glass jars with tobacco smoke and placed in them a sparrow, a magpie and a frog. All three died. "Lastly, we have something to learn from the effects of tobacco on N dogs. If a' dash of tobacco juice be given to a dog daily, he soon loses his hair, then his teeth drop out, and next he becomes blind. Perhaps . this ; experiment experi-ment supplies an answer to the question: ques-tion: , 'Why are men bald?" "Of " course, the work of reformers has injured the educational prospects of the would-be tobacco users. These reformers so often have spoiled all that they might have accomplished by putting put-ting coffee and tea into the. same category cate-gory with tobacco. These fatalities from nicotine show to the simplest that neither of these table drinks can be compared to the poisons 'of,, tobacco.' and the cry of the reformeV becomes at once too much 'wolf.' "But to come to the certain influences of nicotine. Both Sichel and Critche'tt, well known English oculists, discovered that a smoker who used so little as five-eighths of a.t ounce of tobacca a day for any sustained period suffered a wasting ' of "he optic nerve, called amaurosis. The disease is a dulling of the sight, yet no examination of the eye will reveal the defect. Whether it is caused by the irritating effect of the" smoke, or whether it operates through the nervous system, is a question,' but in any case, other things being equal, it is recognized that the smoker has not .as good sight as has the non-smoker. "If the eyes suffer, so does the nose, and Dr. Armory Hare, who liked a whiff of the uipe as well as the next one, has laid stress upon the statement that every chronic smoker suffers more than, his-share of nasal catarrh. This is strengthened by the well-observed fact that men, more than women, are afflicted with 'colds in the head' in chronic form. ; "Chronic laryngitis is one of the recognized rec-ognized effects of too much smoking. It may begin with the victim's remarking remark-ing that he becomes hoarse without seeming cause. The acrid fumes of the tobacco have set up a slight inflammation inflamma-tion which makes the surface more susceptible to cold, a.nd as the smoke keeps up the irritation and the drafts catch him, he has chronic laryngitis before he knows iiL "Darwin once accused people who smoked many .hours a day of having little common sense. This observation may be regarded from the point of view of the physician with more than a shade of credulity. Smoking has a disposition to dry the mouth and stop the flow of saliva. With an insufficient amount of saliva in the stomach the processes of digestion are interfered with, and the person having a stomach full of food lying in an undigested state cannot be in the most reasonable and reasoning mood possible. "Of all these ills, tobacco heart is one of the most'pronounced and dangerous. In almost any hospital one may see victims of the tobacco heart, scarcely abte to sit up in bed and too weak to move. In the hospital these patients are refused tobacco and they soon recover. re-cover. . '"Angina pectoris, one of the most dangerous and painful of diseases, often oft-en Ms caused by excessive smoking. Some of the most prominent men in all walks of life have died from it, and in most cases they have smoked to excess. , ."Does tobacco cause cancer? This question has been disputed, when answered an-swered in the affirmative, largely because be-cause among the vast number of smo- I kers in the world so few of them have cancer. Yet in English statistics it has been shown that out of Feventy-eight cases of cancer of the mouth treated in a cancer hospital only ten cases were those of women. Taking this showing, and the fact that a wound of any kind on a person disposed to cancer may produce the disease, it is not too much to suspect that the pressure of a hard pipestem on the lip, with the consequent conse-quent irritation of . nicotine, may be the direct cause. v "Aside from these most serious consequences con-sequences of smoking, we have the unmistakable un-mistakable evidences that weakened muscles and tremulousness result In nearlv all cases. This is so well recognized" recog-nized" that for athletes In training smoking is prohibited. For rifle scooting scoot-ing the smoker suffers as much from shaky nerves as from his eyesight, and few records have been made by men who were inveterate smokers. "Yes, smoking is something more than a bad habit. Give a dose of it dailiy to a dog, and he soon loses his hair; keep it up and his teeth will drop out, and pursue it still further and the animal will become blind. However, it I Is only the reformer who sees in these, j statements of fact the final end of tobacco to-bacco smoking." . I |