Tobacco and Otorhinolaryngology: Epic and Disaster
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European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck diseases 131 (2014) 183–188 Available online at ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com Review Tobacco and otorhinolaryngology: Epic and disaster a,∗ b c a O. Laccourreye , A. Werner , H. Laccourreye , P. Bonfils a Service ORL et chirurgie cervico-faciale, hôpital européen Georges-Pompidou, AP–HP, université Paris Descartes Sorbonne Paris Cité, 20, rue Leblanc, 75015 Paris cedex 15, France b 18, rue de la Ferme, 92200 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France c Académie nationale de médecine, rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris, France a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Keywords: More than 500 papers are retrieved from the PubMed database by the keywords “Tobacco” and “Otorhin- Tobacco olaryngology”, none of which, however, is devoted to the history of a plant that has a major impact on Otorhinolaryngology our specialty and practice. The present report describes and analyzes how tobacco conquered the world, the conflicts it triggered and the impact it has had in our field over the past centuries. © 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. 1. In the beginning, revelation Nicot (Fig. 2), then French ambassador to Portugal, came into con- tact with “tabaco”; some say he planted seeds he had got from a In the late 15th century, the Spanish, followed by the Portuguese, Flemish merchant in the embassy garden in Lisbon, others that a came across tobacco in the New World. On October 28, 1492, on Portuguese market-gardener supplied him with a powder of dried the eastern coast of Cuba, Columbus’s crewmen noticed Arawaks leaves [1,4]. He wrote to the Cardinal of Lorraine, who was close inhaling the smoke of a dried herb. In a semantic shift, “tabaco” to the Queen of France: “I have come into possession of an herb – which, in the native language referred to the pipe – was adopted of the Indies, marvelous and proven force against the Noli Me Tan- by the Spaniards for the contents of the pipe, and then for the plant gere and fistulae despaired incurable by physicians and a singular itself [1–4]. Eight years later, Alvarez Cobral landed in Brazil, and prompt remedy to nausea. When so it shall have seeded I will dis- the historian Pêro vas da Caminha gave the name “pétun” to the patch the same to a gardener in Marmoustier and place some of tobacco that the Tupi in the region of Rio de Janeiro smoked and the plant in a barrel to be replanted and maintained likewise as I called “petyn” in their language [1–4]. have for the orange trees” [2]. According to historians, Catherine The first tobacco seeds reached Spain in 1520, and the physician de’ Medici and/or her son Francis II soothed their headaches with of King Phillip II was able to confirm the virtues the native Ameri- the plant, and the entire Court thus adopted this “Queen’s herb” or cans claimed for the plant: appetite suppressant, mood enhancer, “Catherinary herb”, taken in the form of snuff [2,5]. In 1586, in his psychostimulant and local anesthetic [1,2]. In 1550, the Spanish Historia Generalis Plantarium, the physician and botanist Jacques introduced tobacco in the Low Countries. The Ottoman Empire dis- Daléchamps (Fig. 3) named in “Nicotiana”, for Jean Nicot, much covered it in 1560, Morocco in 1593 (via the Sudan, seeds having to the annoyance of Thevet, who expostulated: “I was the first in been exported to Africa by Portuguese merchants) [2]. Tobacco France that brought the seeds of this plant and also that planted and seeds were taken to Japan by Christian missionaries in 1596, while did name the same “herb of Angoulême”. Since what time, a trifler, French Huguenot refugees “contaminated” the Holy Roman Empire that never was of the voyage, some ten years after my return to this [2]. land, has given it his name!” [2]. Several individuals were involved in the subjugation of France. In Virginia, as of 1610, Sir Walter Raleigh began tobacco farm- In 1552, André Thevet (Fig. 1), then chaplain of an expedition to ing with labor imported via the Triangular Trade between Europe, found a colony in the bay of Rio de Janeiro, rediscovered “pétun” Africa and the Americas [2]. Thereafter, it spread throughout all [1,2]. He was driven back to France in 1556 by an outbreak of plague strata of society. In France under Louis XIII, tobacco was selling and, among other curiosities, brought back seeds that he planted for 12 sous a pound in the form of “carrots” that could be grated, and grew near Angoulême [1,2]. A few years later, in 1561, Jean chewed or crumbled for smoking [1] (to this day in France, tobac- conists’ shop-fronts are distinguished by a sign in the form of a long red lozenge, based on two “carrots” joined at their tops [2]). Only in 1809 did Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, professor of chem- ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 01 56 09 3463. istry at the Medical School of Paris, isolate a volatile alkaline active E-mail address: [email protected] (O. Laccourreye). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anorl.2013.11.003 1879-7296/© 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. 184 O. Laccourreye et al. / European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck diseases 131 (2014) 183–188 Fig. 1. André Thevet. Fig. 3. Jacques Daléchamps. principle in tobacco leaf juice [5]. In 1828, Posell and Reimann, in the University of Heidelberg, purified this psychoactive substance, 2. Growth and development and named it nicotine [5]. Nicotine induces addiction and habit- uation and has insecticidal and fungicidal properties that protect Several factors militated in favor of tobacco’s conquest of the the plant against insects and certain forms of parasitosis. It is toxic world. Initially, its medical reputation was seductive. Add to that when ingested orally – a single cigar contains double the lethal dose the power of fashion and addiction combined with the search for of 40 to 60 mg – and its first proven use as a murder weapon dates profit on the part of industry and the State did the rest. from 1851 [5,6]. Its metabolism and interaction with dopamine A look at the list of the virtues that physicians and men of were described in 1950 [1]. science at first attributed to tobacco is enough to explain the enthu- siasm. Ambroise Paré, for example, recommended local application of the “Catherinary herb” for wounds, and inhalation as a precau- tion against plague [7]. The physicist René Ferchaud de Réaumur suggested it would be useful in resuscitating victims of drowning, and for Trousseau it had the same properties as solanaceae such as datura inasmuch as he had relieved one of his asthma attacks with a few drags on a cigar [7]. In the field of ENT, Diderot’s Encyclopédie explained that, in the form of snuff, tobacco “causes an agree- able titillation of the nerves of the pituitary membrane”, Voltaire asked “Was tobacco made for the nose or the nose for tobacco?” and Trousseau advised fumigations of tobacco to treat laryngeal phthisis [1,7,8]. Fashion played just as great a role. For courtiers and artists, the use of tobacco was de rigueur, and this positive image would last into the mid-19th century. In 1665, in Molière’s Don Juan, Sganarelle says of tobacco: “It delights the honest man, and whoever lives without tobacco is not worthy of living.” Queen Marie-Antoinette’s wedding chest contained 52 snuff-boxes (all in gold!), while Frederick I of Prussia founded an Academy of the Pipe [2]. Locke and Newton were both smokers, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a tobacco cantata, and Kant, Voltaire, Pope, Schiller, Musset, Baude- laire and Georges Sand to name but a few praised the benefits of the herb [2]. Freud later said, “I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control” [9]. The poor also seized on the herb. Beggars smoked “papelitos”: scraps of tobacco rolled up in a vegetable envelope then in paper. This ancestor of the cigarette appeared in the 16th century in Spain and her colonies, and Napoleon’s troops adopted it during the Fig. 2. Jean Nicot. Iberian campaign, where their pipes tended to get broken during O. Laccourreye et al. / European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck diseases 131 (2014) 183–188 185 the fighting [1,2]. In 1842, in the “Gros Caillou” (“Big Stone”!) factory that tobacco causes and infect our temples with a repugnant odor”, in Paris, the French state tobacco monopoly produced the first real and in 1650 all those who “touch the Devil’s herb” were threatened cigarette, five years before Philip Morris set up his first cigarette with excommunication by Innocent X because cigar and pipe smoke factory in Oxford and a tobacconist’s in London [1,2]. These early was masking the perfume of the incense and causing certain monks cigarettes were hand-made by a female workforce, and productiv- to cough in the middle of hymns [1–3]. In Russia, after a smoker had, ity was low. Then in 1883 in Richmond, Virginia, James Bonsack in 1634, set off a fire that destroyed many of the wooden houses of slashed costs by inventing, at the age of 18, a machine that could Moscow, Tsar Mikhail Fedorovitch Romanov I decreed that dealers turn out 120,000 cigarettes a day – the equivalent of 48 female should be whipped, smokers caned on the soles of their feet and factory-hands of the time [1–4].