TOBACCO, INSANITY AND NERVOUSNESS. V 



intoxication, disappeared after freedom from the habit was 

 established.* 



But whenever a case has gotten so far, that commitment 

 to an institution has become necessary, the prospects are 

 not so good, because such persons, as a rule, cannot be 

 convinced that tobacco is, or has been, the cause of their 

 mental trouble. Their argument is that almost everybody 

 smokes, that all their friends and acquaintances chew or 

 vSmoke, without showing any symptoms of insanity. I The 



* One of my patients experienced among other morbid symptoms an 

 almost uncontrollable desire to throw himself out of the window, when- 

 ever he had to go to the upper stories of the house in which he was 

 employed; this impulse was so overpowering that he did not dare to 

 approach the windows and was in mortal fear of high places. He was 

 a smoker and a neurasthenic. The discontinuance of the drug termin- 

 ated his morbid impulses and fear. 



X This is an argument which it is hard to invalidate, because the smoker 

 does not appreciate the law of difference and variability of the resist- 

 ing power on the part of the organism, although this law is a matter of 

 every-day observation. While some persons seem to be proof against 

 almost any injurious agencies, others will yield on the slightest occasion, 

 to much less powerful influences, mechanical, toxic, or morbific in the 

 stricter sense. Again, the susceptibility to injury varies in the same 

 individual. What is true of individuals applies with equal force to 

 nations. Thus, the Germans have been called a nation of thinkers and 

 smokers, and, seemingly, their smoking habits have not interfered with 

 their power for logic, nor, for that matter, [except a generally pfevaling 

 short-sightedness] with their physical constitution. This has, for a long 

 time, puzzled the French, who have tried to account for the dire effects of 

 tobacco on their own countrymen in various ways. Some investigators 

 think this difference in effect is due to the difference in the manner of 

 raising tobacco in the two countries, and the different percentage of 

 nicotine thus obtained. The Germans, on the other hand, are dumb- 

 founded at the amouut of alcohol which the Russian consumes appar- 

 ently without injury. 



This discrepancy, in effect, is certainly not a matter of difference in 

 quality. As remarked before, all this is a question of resisting power 

 produced and governed by racial, social, climatic, industrial and a num- 

 ber of other more or less occult influences. Now, all observers agree 

 that in our country many conditions conspire to make us a nervous peo- 

 ple, to produce what has even been styled, ." American nervousness." 



