"The Piss of a Fox": Early Tobacco Addicts

Shortly after tobacco was first introduced in Europe, it was thought to be beneficial to your health. It was thought to cure a number of ailments and even take away bad breath, although a smoker's wife at the time told her husband: "It makes your breath stink like the piss of a fox!"

In England, smoking tobacco really cought on and by 1577 it was even being grown here. Tobacco leaves were smoked in clay pipes and by the late 1590s one could purchase pre-filled disposable ones suitable for one use only, much like we would get a disposable camera today. The used pipes were then habitually thrown away, many into the Thames river, where nowadays, enthusiasts of uncovering items from the past find them in abundance, immersed in the thick mud left behind by the tide.
A rather disgusting description of the smoking habits of the time gives us the picture: "...they draw the smoke into their mouths which they puff out again through their nostrils like smoke, along with it plenty of phlegm and defluxion from the head." Charming.
A Swiss medical student visiting London in 1599, was told that "the inside of one man's veins after death was found to be covered in soot just like a chimney...".

Interestingly enough, tobacco was much more popular than cannabis of opium, at that time. Cannabis was thought to be a good cure for ear-ache, whereas opium was used mainly to induce sleep. William Turner's instructions of how to deal with an overdose of opium is rather amusing: "For an overdose, make him vomit and administer a sharp clyster [enema] and wake him up by putting stinking things unto his nose".



Reference: "Elizabeth's London: Everyday life in Elizabethan London", by Liza Picard, published by Phoenix.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Interesting.. Especially the words of the Swiss medical student. I wonder if that is somehow true?
Friday, 04 May, 2007
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catherine the Great and her Many Lovers

Image
Catherine the Great was empress of Russia from 1762 until she died in 1796. She was born in 1729 in Poland and in 1744 was taken to Russia to marry the young Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne and not of a sane mind. For seven years during their marriage Peter spent his time playing with toy soldiers and dogs and showed no interest in sex. In fact he had a physical disability, a very tight foreskin, which may have played an important part in that matter. Finally the empress Elizabeth gave Catherine the permission to take a lover, which she did and was soon pregnant. She convinced Peter it was his own child, as was the plan anyway. In the meantime he had been circumcised so that he could perform the sexual act. Catherine developed a taste for young soldiers. She had a special area built in her bedroom, which was curtained off and where she received her lovers. Gregory Orlov was her on and off lover for around thirteen years. He was said to possess excellent equipment, unbelievable ‘st...
Read more

Emperor Elagabalus; the Teenage Pervert

Image
When the emperor Caracalla was murdered in 217, the fourteen-year-old Elagabalus succeeded him. He only ruled for 4 years, but in that short period of time he commited a variety of grotesque and debauched acts, enough to make Caligula and Commodus seem rather plain. His real name was Bassianus but as he developed an intense interest in worshippng the Syrian god Elagabal, became High Priest of the cult and so had his name changed to Elagabalus. To honor his god, he demanded that hundereds of cattle were slaughtered daily on huge sacrificial altars. He had a temple built on the Palatine Hill and ordered the Romans to worship a statue of a giant phallus, which didn't go down very well at all... Eventually he decided he was the god embodied. He started to wear women's clothes and make-up, implored his surgeons to cut his penis off and make him a vagina and when they said tehy could not do this he settled for circumcision. His body is said to have been very effeminate and he had a m...
Read more

The Smelly Woad Dyers

Image
Woad leaves Before Indigo was imported from the East in the 16th Century, the only source of rich blue dye was Woad, Isatis Tinctoria, a plant which is a member of the cabbage family and which was brought to Britain by the Celts. They called it Glasto, hence Glastonbury, which means ‘a place where woad grows’. The process by which the dye was extracted was lengthy and very smelly indeed, (think combination of raw sewage and rotten cabbage) and the people who did this work, woad dyers, were outcasts of society, since they smelt so much. As a result they were isolated and inbred. There was no way of hiding if you were a woad dyer as even if you washed yourself really well to remove the stench, the blue dye could be seen on your fingers and under your fingernails. Queen Elizabeth I, not being able to stand the stench from their workshops, decreed that woad dyers should be at least 5 miles away from wherever she was staying. As it took 50 kilos of woad in order to produce 5 kilos of pigme...
Read more