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: Deacon, as the title of his book just quoted shows, was very fond of alliteration, and one sentence of his diatribe may be quoted. He warned his readers that tobacco-smoke was "very pernicious unto their bodies, too profluvious for many of their purses, and most pestiferous to the publike State." Much may be forgiven, however, to the introducer of so charming a term of abuse as "profluvious." Deacon's book takes the form of a dialogue, and after nearly 200 pages of argument, in which the unfortunate herb gets no mercy, one of the interlocutors, a trader in tobacco, is so convinced of the iniquity of his trade, and of his own parlous state if he continue therein, that he declares that the two hundred pounds' worth of this "beastly tobacco" which he owns, shall "presently packe to the fire," or else be sent "swimming down the Thames."
From Chapter 5: When excavations were in progress early in 1901, preparatory to the construction of Kingsway and Aldwych, they included the removal of bodies from the burying-grounds of St. Clement Danes and St. Mary-le-Strand; and among the bones were found a couple of the curious tobacco-pipes called "plague-pipes," because they are supposed to have been used as a protection against infection by those whose office it was to bury the dead. These pipes have been dug up from time to time in numbers so large that one antiquary, Mr. H. Syer Cuming, has ventured to infer that "almost every person who ventured from home invoked the protection of tobacco."
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