With the results of Bush and the Lancet before him the user of tobacco will be better able to judge of the opinions of those who describe the effects of nicotine on the vision, heart, digestive organs, etc., as likely to be the results of tobacco smoking.
Thus the disturbance of vision ascribed to tobacco smoking is called tobacco amblyopia.
Dr. W. S. Franklin of San Francisco (Calif. State Jour. of Med., 1909, V. 7, p. 85), says that to produce this disease it is necessary to smoke daily from .75 to 1.0 gms. of pure nicotine. If 17% of the nicotine of tobacco is carried in the smoke, in order to absorb that quantity 7 or 8 cheap domestic cigars, 10 or 11 Cubans or 60 cigarettes should be smoked. Now very few smokers consume this amount and according to Bush, and the Lancet, and others there is no such percentage of nicotine in the smoke.
To the use of tobacco is ascribed an acid dyspepsia—this, however, is noticed more particularly in habitual chewers and in this case the nicotine not being burnt has no chance of being decomposed. All writers have agreed that chewing is the worst way that tobacco can be used. Dr. R. V. Dolbey says: (Northwest Medicine, 1909, V. 1 p. 99).
“In chewing, quantities of watery extract of tobacco are swallowed and taken down with the food containing a large percentage of nicotine and causing severe dyspepsia. While tobacco juice solution in the laboratory kills intestinal bacteria, excessive tobacco chewing does not have this effect on the human body owing to the fact that the gastric and pancreatic juices act on it and alter it.”
Dr. I. S. Gilfilian discusses the effects of tobacco on the heart in the St. Paul Medical Journal, July, 1912, p. 338. He says that the important part whether organic changes in the cardio-vascular system may be produced by tobacco is still doubtful, and that it has never been shown that smokers suffer more from organic heart disease than nonsmokers.
General opinion is that smoking lessens the pulse rate and slightly increases the blood pressure, and that it is a cause of arterio-sclerosis.
With regard to arterio-sclerosis, Dr. A. Lorand of Carlsbad who is a world-wide authority on the effects of toxic substances on the blood, says in his book, Old Age Deferred (English translation, 1910, p. 367):
“Clinically we have observed the great frequency of arterio-sclerosis in great smokers, but we do not think that two or three light cigars a day, but never before meals, can do any harm save in exceptional cases. Indeed there are a few instances of persons living to be over 100, notwithstanding the fact that they were smokers—a fact contrary to the observation of Hufeland who pretends that he never heard of such a case. The famous English painter, Frith, who died in October, 1909, used to smoke 6 cigars a day, and Mr. F. of Chartres, in France, passed last year his 100th birthday in spite of his having taken snuff all his life.”
If there were any serious lesions caused in the human system by the continued use of tobacco we might naturally expect that life insurance companies would take notice of it, but hear what they have to say (Medical Record, New York, July 12, 1913):