Tobacco History:
The Social History of Smoking
by George Latimer Apperson
First published in 1914
"The Social History of Smoking" by George Latimer Apperson, can be purchased at Amazon.com in two different versions. Depending on the quality of the edition, prices range between $35 and $104.
From Chapter 3: The fumes of dried coltsfoot leaves were used as a remedy in cases of difficulty of breathing, both in ancient Roman times and in Tudor England. Lyte, in his translation, 1578, of Dodoens' "Historie of Plants," says of coltsfoot: "The parfume of the dryed leaves layde upon quicke coles, taken into the mouth through the pipe of a funnell, or tunnell, helpeth suche as are troubled with the shortnesse of winde, and fetche their breath thicke or often, and do [ sic] breake without daunger the impostems of the breast." The leaves of coltsfoot and of other plants have often been used as a substitute for tobacco in modern days. A correspondent of Notes and Queries, in 1897, said that when he was a boy he knew an old Calvinist minister, who used to smoke a dried mixture of the leaves of horehound, yarrow and "foal's foot" intermingled with a small quantity of tobacco. He said it was a very good substitute for the genuine article. Similar mixtures, or the leaves of coltsfoot alone, have often been smoked in bygone days by folk who could not afford to smoke tobacco only.
From Chapter 7: It has sometimes been said that Swift smoked; but this is a mistake. He had a fancy for taking tobacco in a slightly different way from the fashionable mode of taking snuff. He told Stella that he had left off snuff altogether, and then in the very next sentence remarked that he had "a noble roll of tobacco for grating, very good." And in a later letter to Stella, May 24, 1711, he asked if she still snuffed, and went on to say, in sentences that seem to contradict one another: "I have left it off, and when anybody offers me their box, I take about a tenth part of what I used to do, then just smell to it, and privately fling the rest away. I keep to my tobacco still, as you say; but even much less of that than formerly, only mornings and evenings, and very seldom in the day." One might infer from this that he smoked, but this Swift never did. His practice was to snuff up cut and dried tobacco, which was sometimes just coloured with Spanish snuff. This he did all his life, but as the mixture he took was not technically snuff, he never owned that he took snuff. Another cleric of the period, well known to fame, who took snuff but also loved his pipe, was Samuel Wesley, rector of Epworth, Lincolnshire, from 1697 to 1735. He not only smoked his pipe, but sang its praises: In these raw mornings, when I'm freezing ripe, What can compare with a tobacco-pipe? Primed, cocked and toucht, 'twould better heat a man Than ten Bath Faggots or Scotch warming-pan. Samuel's greater son, John Wesley, did not share the parental love of a pipe. He spoke of the use of tobacco as "an uncleanly and unwholesome self-indulgence," and described snuffing as "a silly, nasty, dirty custom."
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