> The story of smoking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is capacious enough to include the distillation apparatus of the alchemist, the water pipe of the cannabis smoker, and even medicinal smoke enemas.
I had no idea this was a thing, that's disturbing lol
> Tobacco resuscitation kits consisting of a pair of bellows and a tube were provided by the Royal Humane Society of London and placed at various points along the Thames.[4] European physicians furthermore employed these enemas for a range of ailments
Tobacco enemas using a public kit on the banks of the filthiest river imaginable before hygiene was considered a priority in medical circles..
Actually, yes - you can find this and many other excellent historical medicine tidbits in Quackery [1] (and then be really, really grateful that both science and medicine have advanced significantly since we thought it was a good idea to, er, blow said smoke up said ass).
When I was in Lisbon I'd visited the Museu da Farmácia (mostly because my grandfather was a pharmacist), but after reading your book I realized that (despite also having spent a little time there) I'd overlooked multiple things going on in the park across the street.
It's interesting how early European accounts of Native American tobacco smoking don't seem to bear much similarity to my experiences of tobacco use. In this it describes the Taino becoming "almost drunk" off it. But the only time tobacco made me exhibit anything like that was when I accidentally inhaled way too much of a cigar and became physically ill and delirious. The experience was an extremely unpleasant one involving vomiting, tremors, having difficulty standing up, and slurring speech. But there was none of the "fun" parts of inebriation. I wasn't disinhibited or "loosened up," I just felt like my heart was pounding out of my chest and that I might die. I simply could not imagine anyone putting themselves through that on purpose as recreation.
I also never experienced hallucinations, which is another thing early accounts said Native Americans experienced with tobacco use. I can only imagine they were taking extremely large doses frequently enough that they had been pretty desensitized to it. I can't imagine what cancer rates must have been like!
Wild tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) contains around 9% nicotine whereas domesticated tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) only contains around 2%. It also contains a number of other alkaloids not present in the domesticated version.
Search YouTube for Thuốc lào which is rustica smoked out of a bamboo water pipe and you'll find plenty of videos of people falling over unconscious seconds after taking a single hit.
It is. You can buy Rustica in bulk. I smoke pipes as well as cigars and Rustica is starting to become more popular in the pipe world - Mac Baren just released an HH Rustica series.
The whole falling over unconscious thing seems to be more from people taking a massive bong hit of it and holding it in forever, near as I can tell from Youtube. Not how I enjoy my tobacco.
Cool. I'm a novice piper myself but I suppose it's probably too nicotinic for me. I have some Orlick golden sliced and even that gets me uncomfortably light headed.
Highly recommend Latakia. Smells like a campfire before you even light it, but is delicious. And it's one of those things that soon will no longer exist in this world (the Syrian version is already gone) so experience it while you can.
Not a tobacco person, but curious why it won't exist? Quick research suggests that the Syrian version is gone because of unrest and government restrictions, so might be back if things settle down there. Cyprus (for all its own issues) has been fairly stable of late.
"A dance of “glorious and strange beauty” took place in a wintry garden in the south of England on January 6, 1614."
So specific!! And that's just the first line!
Is it just me, or are they just telling stories about the 16th century? Historians themselves will say history is an interpretative act. 'History' is for us in the present - it only lightly relates to what may or may not have occurred in the past, even if it presented as a fait accompli. I don't think it is possible to get this detail about what went on back then.
I see this sort of article as 'myth making'. Its not to do with reality - no sources are provided for us to check. Its just presented as a ready narrative, and we are meant to accept it.
So, what if that is the myth what are meant to take from it? I think we are meant 'edu-tained'. We can laugh at the fools back then who were literally blowing smoke up each others arses, in reclined splendour. We can enjoy a cannabis narrative - this talks to how we legalise it nowadays. These sorts of myths support the idea of how we are progressed, superior, etc.
Author here - was it really glorious and strange and beautiful? All subjective judgements, so who can truly say. But I can tell you that those judgements are at least drawn from an actual primary source, published in 1614: the stage directions for the performance itself. The link: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Maske_of_Flowers/qC...
Incidentally, that source is linked in the article more than once, along with others.
Correct. There were two recorded performances, one in December, 1613, the second in January, 1614. I went ahead and described the second because it's better documented. I got the exact date from a journal article by a garden historian. [0] These are the kind of things that footnotes are helpful for - if I were writing this up as an academic paper, I'd get into the weeds with these details, but unfortunately it just doesn't work when you're writing it as a straight-ahead narrative without footnotes. That's especially true because it was basically just an introductory anecdote, not the focus of the piece.
I agree though, digging deep into historical sources, I think, should make us all uncomfortable. As you said, historians should never claim to have direct access to historical truth. It's all mediated and all potentially corrupted by the bias of observers/recorders. That's just a fact of doing history, and it's why we're not humanists, not scientists. It's also why I find it so endlessly interesting.
This is why I said that history is an interpretative act. I don't have an issue with the making the best of a past that is hard (impossible?) to discern. And that while our subject matter might be the past, we ourselves are in the present and express our understanding from our own biases and understandings - we talk ourselves into the past, in a way.
What I object to is the indisputable tone - this happened, these are the reasons, etc. It gives the reader the impression of knowledge, but this is an illusion, possibly a dangerous one. It conveys none of the reasoning, jumps and ambiguity that, I think, are the main part of these sorts of investigation.
Personally I would rather have the ambiguity, referring to source material, and try to develop a theory given the evidence - evidence-driven theories. I don't mind if there is no overarching narrative to explain it all. But it seems to me that professional historians feel empowered to present exactly that sort of a narrative, sometimes whether or not it is really supported by the evidence.
Totally agree. When reading history, you can and should substitute an invisible "According to the limited sources I consulted, and modulo their biases/mistakes/oversights, it seems to me the best interpretation of the given data that..." before every statement. Virtually no professional historian is going to claim to be 100% certain of any interpretation they make. It's often the case that more you dig into sources, the less certain you get. (Which is why almost every academic history paper's argument boils down to "this [person/event/era] turns out to be more complicated than we thought").
I also really like Fernand Braudel on events as a kind of epiphenomena of history, the misleading surface disturbances underneath the actual, barely-discernible patterns.
which seems a fair synopsis for me, of Hayden White's position in Metahistory. I thought this quote was interesting:
"In this climate, White (1966) believes that the duty of the researchers in present time is to transform the historical studies so as to liberate the present from the burden of history and to make the historical studies fit in the aims of the community. Seen in this light, history is not seen as a fixed ultimate entity that cannot be touched and that the historians have to accept it as it is. However, the historians should refuse to study the past as an end or ultimate being but contribute to offer some solutions for the problems of the present, which the professional historiography is unable to achieve."
I liked the general analysis that it seems White provides, but I don't like the moral relativism that is implied in the quote above. Why is it a historian's job to provide solutions for the present? What special values do they have? I don't like post-modern, moral relativism - where 'my truth' is the same as 'the truth'.
My position is that our knowledge of history is imperfect, that we cannot know the past. But a single past really did occur. Rather than express the evidence and express their reasoning for what that means, when historians apply narratives over the evidence they are covering an mystifying the past. This is to say I am receiving negative knowledge - I am receiving an informed but biased view that I will find it hard to unpick. And that is all history afaik! So little primary evidence, so many books and articles!
Perhaps similar to the OP, I'm accustomed to more explicit citations, so throughout the article it's really unclear to me what source applies to which quote. Is that standard practice in your domain?
I much prefer footnotes myself, where you can see directly what is being cited. Unfortunately there's a wide range of practices for online writing, but the norm I've found is usually just hyperlinks to digitized sources.
The Appendix, the online history journal I helped create back in the day, tried to experiment with a more detailed way of doing in-line citations, via small icons that you can click to see images, citations of primary source texts, even music or films on occasion. You can see it in action here:
> Tobacco is indeed native to the Americas, and early modern Europeans, Africans, and Asians did encounter tobacco smoking as a new practice without precedent in ancient texts or preexisting social conventions. But, as archaeologists and anthropologists have been documenting for decades, tobacco was not the only drug that the peoples of the Old World smoked—even before the voyages of Columbus.
that was harder to say when "Tobacco is Evil" propaganda dominated any discussion of smoking. Some of the old school mixtures are rough I'd rather smoke sawdust.
Seconding the request for more information, a quick Google search didn't yield any results for sawdust being a MAOI.
But this is so far out of my area of expertise that my search was probably worthless anyway, because I may not have been able to properly assess any sources anyway.
It’s not sawdust per se, rather the smoke from it — more exactly, the pyrolysis products of certain amino acids: heating L-tryptophan, for example, produces various Harmala alkaloids.
The effects are also dependent on the type of wood, as some woods do naturally contain tannins which act as MAO inhibitors.
Harmala alkaloids, of course, are naturally present in Penganum harmala, one of the two traditional ingredients of Ayahuasca. The inherent psychoactivity of this family of compounds cannot be overstated.
Hmm, of course nicotine itself is stimulating, but this makes me wonder if MAO inhibition might be one of the causes for tobacco smokers seemingly being more communicative? When smoking was still allowed in trains, cars were usually split in smoking and non-smoking areas. I always found it fascinating to watch how the different groups behaves if I happened to walk for a while to find a free place. The non-smoking area typically felt dead quiet, almost depressingly. And one you opened the door to the smoking area, pretty relaxed chatting amongst the travelers was the norm.
It might also explain why I loved being in a wood shop so much as a kid. Something about the warm, sweet smell of wood smoke when the friction from a saw caused it to heat up was so relaxing.
Several woody aromatic compounds also have partial molecular similarity with neurotransmitters. Could it have been activating neural pathways directly in your brain through your olfactory?
Definitely. Since the same compounds are formed in meat during cooking, so there is a curious evolutionary correlation: did the first humans harnessing fire and cooking meat do so for the psychoactive effects?
The implications also touch demographics, since humans have great variance in the activity of their MAO-A and MAO-B genes. People who get easily addicted to smoke flavoured food, coffee and/or tobacco may simply have inherited a high-activity MAO gene that they are trying to compensate for.
I made a relevant comment about this a while back[1]. Thinking it was a nootropic got me addicted for years and brought no benefits. I still get the urge to smoke and it's been years now.
Nicotine is not the main cause of tobacco addiction: it is attributable to MAO inhibitors created pyrolytically during the roasting and burning of plant material.
The same goes for coffee and coffee substitutes with respect to caffeine.
Anecdotal experiences are not evidence of anything else than someone having experienced something in a certain way.
It is completely feasible that you simply are more susceptible to the effects of plain nicotine, e.g. due to differences in nAChR genes, or maybe you already had a MAOI source in your daily diet, e.g. medications, cannabis smoke, coffee, soy sauce, beer, wine, sake, roasted/grilled foods...
The same could have been said of tobacco in the 50's. Turns out it was bad for you.
You're spreading misinformation and could get other people addicted. You're making assumptions on my diet just to dismiss the well-known fact that nicotine is addictive[1]. Most sites that say otherwise are either social media sites like reddit where echo chambers form, or they're obviously pro-ecig and extremely biased.
In all honesty, it seems your personal experience is clouding your objective judgment.
There are plenty of academic studies regarding the matter of MAOIs in tobacco smoke, and their addictiveness.
Also, most studies on smoking do not make a difference between smoking and pure nicotine. It would be great if you could check the sources of the Wikipedia article to see if this is the case there.
My judgement isn't clouded, but I've been directly harmed by such misinformation before. I want other people reading to know that nicotine isn't some wonder nootropic that brings no side effects or addiction, because it's just not the case.
I had no idea this was a thing, that's disturbing lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke_enema