Perhaps the most exotic threat to health was identified in the 1830s, when a worrying new disease swept through the ranks of America’s priests. Doctors everywhere from California to New Jersey reported that pulpits were falling silent as the nation’s clergymen succumbed to a “loss of tone in the vocal organs,” causing hoarseness and an inability to speak in public. Many (“a multitude of divines,” according to a contemporary report in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal) were said to have resigned their livings after finding themselves no longer capable of addressing their flock or even leading daily worship.
What could have caused this ecclesiastical catastrophe? One sage observer observed that the priests of olden times had preached as much, of not more, than their modern counterparts, and their voices “were the last to fail.” So what had changed? Dr. Mauran, a distinguished physician from Providence, Rhode Island, thought he had the answer. The clergymen of yesteryear were all enthusiastic smokers, he pointed out, and were rarely seen without a pipe of cigar in their mouth. Chewing or smoking tobacco, he argued, “kept up a secretion in the neighborhood of the glottis, favorable to the good condition and healthy action of the voice box” – as demonstrated by the habits of another profession:
Lawyers speak hours together, and when leisure permits, many of them smoke, and, as a general rule, the leading advocates are very great smokers – and yet, who ever heard of a lawyer who had lost his voice?
Clerics, on the other hand, had largely forsworn tobacco since the rise of the temperance movement, and were now paying the price.
Dr. Mauran strongly recommended that ministers who wanted to ensure a long and healthy career should resume their cigarettes and pipes without delay. And that is how a major medical journal came to warn its readers about the dangers of not smoking.
Source:
Morris, Thomas. “Hidden Dangers.” The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine. Dutton, An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018. 290-91. Print.
If you enjoy this type of content, please consider donating to my Patreon!
No comments, yet...