79 



On the other hand I could tell of women who did not object to the hus- 

 band smoking, in fact enjoyed tobacco. When you consider under what 

 conditions some women spend their time, perhaps in a flat with bad air, 

 with visits down town, to theatres or clubs or shopping, living under ''high 

 tension", which often though not necessarily means a high blood pressure, 

 you can readily see why they get ease from inhaling the smoke of others. It 

 is only one step further for them to take up smoking. Such homes are 

 usually childless; if there is a child the physician may be called late at night 

 to find an acute attack of tobaccosis, especially after a friend has visited the 

 father and they have "smoked up" and filled the house, to which those not 

 accustomed react acutely. The anaphrodisiac effect of tobacco and its 

 influence on divorce and on race suicide can not here be discussed. 



THE CHRONIC ILL HEALTH OF DARWIN, HUXLEY, SPENCER 

 AND GEORGE ELLIOT. 1905. This was an attempt to interpret, 

 through their biographies, the ill health of those no longer living, in the 

 light of a study of living people who seemed to have similar ill health. What 

 can the living learn from the lives of the dead? I shall refer to this again. 



Parenthetically I might refer to a paper, vintage of 1905, on NEURAS- 

 THENOID CONDITIONS, in other words, American Nervousness, pre- 

 sented before the American Medical Association, at Portland, Oregon. 

 On that trip I saw all sorts of people and noted the environment under which 

 they lived, from the simple Indian in the open air to John Chinaman in 

 Chinatown. The Indian in former days, and still in isolation and away 

 from the white man, uses tobacco sparingly. People living under slum 

 conditions use sedatives to excess. John Chinaman at home smoked opium, 

 but since occidental pressure has practically forced him out of that, he has 

 taken up tobacco. From the standpoint of coniosis, that is worse, for the 

 tobacco user is a greater germ distributor than the opium smoker. 



1906. At this place I would have to review my Presidential Address 

 on the EVOLUTION OF MEDICINE IN INDIANA. I could amplify 

 the five pages on Malaria into many chapters and similarly the five pages on 

 Tuberculosis. The tobacco habit and the chewing habit are referred to but 

 I did not like to mention these too frequently; it rather grates on the ear. 

 Malaria has practically disappeared from Indiana by cleaning up the breed- 

 ing places of the anopheles mosquito. Tuberculosis will disappear when 

 our cities are clean. Today one in every seven or eight of us dies of tuber- 

 culosis. This rate should be enormously reduced, not by erecting more 



