We know smoking is horrible, but this diatribe looks at the possible effect on the lungs, as well as almost everything else!
“The propensity to smoking is declared by the physicians to be actually one of the most efficient causes of the German tendency to diseases of the lungs. In point of expense, its waste is enormous. In Hamburgh alone 50,000 boxes of cigars have been consumed in a year, each box costing about 3l. sterling: 150,000l. puffed into the air! And it is to be remembered, that even this is but a part of the expense; the cigar adorning the lip only of the better order, and even among those, only of the young; the mature generally abjuring this small vanity, and blowing away with the mighty Egyptian plague of frogs, is felt every where and in every thing. It poisons the streets, the clubs, and the coffee houses; furniture, clothes, equipage, person are redolent of the abomination. It makes even the dullness of the newspaper doubly narcotic; that napkin on the table, tells instantly that native hands have been over it; every eatable and drinkable, all that can be seen, felt, heard, or understood, is saturated with tobacco; the very air we breathe is but a conveyance for this poison into the lungs; and every man, woman and child, rapidly acquires the complexion of a boiled chicken. From the hour of their waking, if nine-tenths of the population can ever be said to be awake at all, to the hour of their lying down, which in innumerable instances the peasantry do in their clothes, the pipe is never out of their mouths; one mighty fumigation reigns, and human nature is smoke-dried buy tens of thousands of square miles. ~But if it be a crime to shorten life, or extinguish faculties, the authority of the chief German physiologists charges this custom with effecting both in a very remarkable degree. They compute that of twenty deaths of men between eighteen and thirty-five, ten originate in the waste of the constitution by smoking. The universal weakness of the eyes, which makes the Germans par excellence a spectacled nation, is probably attributed to the same cause of the general nervous debility. Tobacco burns out their blood, their teeth, their eyes, and their brains; turns their flesh into mummy, and their mind into metaphysics. – From a Journal of the Defence of Hamburgh in 1813.”
The Stamford Mercury, 30th November, 1832.