| Description Of Item | Press cuttings of page 140 from the Medical Circular, originally published on 31 August 1864, and of page 227 from the same journal, originally published on 3 October 1864.
The first cutting is regarding the action of tobacco on the heart, and reports parts of a paper read by Dr [Émile] Decaisne. He saw patients in Mello, Cires-lès-Mello, and Saint-Wast-Lès Mello (Oise), and explained how in heavy smokers, he noticed issues of ‘intermittence of the pulse, entirely unconnected with organic disease of the heart’. He also noted some of these men had symptoms of dyspepsia. After diminishing or stopping the habit of smoking, the intermittence ceased but the stomach issues and ‘indigestion’ remained. He drew the conclusions that ‘excessive smoking induces in some cases what I may term a state of narcotism of the heart, indicated by intermittences in the cardiac and arterial pulsations’ and that ‘this irregularity of the circulation may occasionally be removed, if the habit be partially or altogether discontinued’.
The second cutting is a short extract of a communication made in response to Decaisne’s paper, in which [H.] Namias explains that symptoms of poisoning were found on a man who wrapped tobacco under his shirt to smuggle it, noticed alongside ‘the intermittent action of the heart mentioned by Dr Decaisne’.
From the collection of Thomas Laycock. |