10 TOBACCO, INSANITY AND NERVOUSNESS. 



alcoholic insane when leaving the institution to enter active 

 life again, generally knows and admits that alcohol has 

 been the cause of his mental break-down, the nicotine-vic- 

 tim does not admit anything. 



There has been a movement on foot in the medical press, 

 and to some extent in the daily papers, which latter 

 chronicle the few cases that come to public knowledge 

 under the head: " Gone insane from cigarette-smoking, "* 

 etc., to counteract the spread of this fatal habit, fatal to 

 the individual himself and pernicious to the coming genera- 

 tion ; but so far, apparently without any appreciable 

 result. 



French medical observers are of the opinion that one of 



This " nervousness " in other words means a weakness, an instability, a 

 vulnerability of the nervous system. Add to this the unquestionably 

 stroug quality of the tobacco which the taste of the American public 

 exacts from the manufacturer, and it becomes plain that there exist two 

 cogent reasons why we should be on our guard vis-a-vis the indiscrimi- 

 nate use of the article. 



* Whether there is a constituent in the cigarette endowed with special 

 properties as a nerve and brain-poison, I have not been able to ascertain. 

 My friend, Dr. J. C. Mulhall, of this city, in a paper read before the 

 Medico-Chirurgical Society several years ago, claimed that it was the 

 cheapness and easy acquisition of the article and consequently its un- 

 bounded consumption, that rendered it so pernicious, especially to the 

 young, and that its contents differed in no way from other tobacco. I 

 have no doubt that pecuniary considerations and the temptation to fill 

 the little scraps of time with smoking contribute largely to the lamentable 

 effects of cigarette consumption : but the result of my inquiries among 

 former victims of the cigarette habit leads me to believe that the action 

 of cigarette smoke' on the nervous system is totally different from that 

 of the cigar. I hope for the sake of humanity that the charge so often 

 made that opium is used in cigarette manufacturing cannot be substan- 

 tiated. If true, it would constitute the lowest depth of commercial 

 infamy. However this may be, one thing seems to be generally con- 

 ceded, that is the well-nigh universal habit of cigarette smokers to 

 "inhale" and thus to multiply the chances of nicotine-absorption. 

 Possibly it is on this account that moral and intellectual blight befalls so 

 oft,en the juvenile habitue and that the adult victim in time becomes 

 fidgety and cranky, sometimes barely able to move along the narrow strip 

 of the borderland of insanity. 



