Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/693

venience; and there are some who are able to smoke just before sitting down at the table. Smoking generally dulls the appetite and gives relief against the pains of hunger. But after eating the desire to smoke becomes irresistible. This is the psychological moment; and the pleasure we feel then is more intense than at any other time in the day. The pipe or the cigar is a condition of good digestion for some smokers, but in others it produces gastric troubles. Nervous people, those who lead a too sedentary life, and office men, especially if they have the habit of smoking before meals, gradually lose their appetite, and acquire instead of it a painful anxiety and nausea. Others suffer from pyrosis. There are smokers who can not light a cigar at some hours in the day without having the feeling of hot iron that marks that affection. Nearly all excessive smokers are dyspeptics; and the fact is explained by the excess of salivation and the diminution of the gastric juice and of the functional energy of the stomach. Next after the digestive troubles, the most common affections touch the respiratory organs and the heart. Granular pharyngitis is very common among persons who smoke to excess. The irritation of the pharynx is often communicated to the larynx, and there results a peculiar dry cough. Others feel a temporary oppression in the evening after having smoked during the day. A special form of asthma has been mentioned as caused by the abuse of tobacco; but cases of it must be very rare, for I have never observed it, though I have passed my life among smokers. Affections of the heart are more frequent. Some doctors assert that one fourth of the smokers are afflicted with palpitations and irregularities of the pulse. I do not know where such observations have been made, but I have never seen any cases of the kind. I, as well as other doctors, have met cases of angina pectoris, chiefly among persons who passed their lives in an atmosphere saturated with tobacco, and among those who have swallowed the smoke of their cigars, and have not been surprised at them, because the smoke then enters into the lesser ramifications of the bronchial vessels, where it impresses directly the finest nervous threads of the lungs and the heart, and its action induces the spasms of suffocation that constitute that terrible disease. These symptoms are at first fleeting, and rarely mortal; but, if the patient does not abandon his habit, they occur more frequently, and become more grave till death ensues in one of them. Disasters from breathing an atmosphere saturated with tobacco-smoke seem more liable to occur with children than with grown persons. Staying in smoking-rooms, where the smoke is sometimes so thick that one can hardly see from one end of the room to the other, is dangerous to persons subject to palpitations, even though they do not smoke. Dr. Vallin has cited three facts conclusive as to this point, one of which re-