“Blowing smoke” today means flattering someone insincerely or lying to them outright. The phrase has a surprisingly vivid backstory involving 18th-century medicine, but the connection between the old practice and the modern slang is murkier than most people think. Here’s what actually happened, and how the expression likely came about.
The Tobacco Smoke Enema Was Real
In the second half of the 1700s, European doctors genuinely believed that blowing tobacco smoke into a drowning victim’s rectum could bring them back to life. The idea was that the smoke would warm the body and stimulate breathing. It sounds absurd now, but at the time it was considered legitimate, state-funded medicine.
The practice gained formal backing in London around 1774, when two physicians named William Hawes and Thomas Cogan founded an organization dedicated to rescuing drowning victims. That group eventually became the Royal Humane Society, which still exists today under the sponsorship of the British monarchy. The society paid 4 guineas (roughly $160 in modern terms) to anyone who successfully revived a drowning person pulled from the Thames. Tobacco smoke enemas were one of the recommended techniques.
At first, the procedure was exactly as unpleasant as it sounds. A medic would insert a tube into the victim’s rectum and literally blow pipe smoke through it with their own lungs. Before long, someone mercifully invented bellows for the job, along with a variety of rectal tubes that spared the practitioner from mouth-to-tube contact. These kits became widely available and could even be purchased in London’s secondhand shops. For a stretch of the 18th century, tobacco smoke enemas sat alongside leeches and turpentine treatments as mainstream medicine.
The practice wasn’t limited to drowning. Doctors applied it to a wide range of conditions, treating it as something of a cure-all. Governments in cities like Venice promoted resuscitation techniques involving smoke enemas at considerable public expense, viewing drowning prevention as a matter of civic duty even though drownings accounted for only a small fraction of urban deaths.
Why It Fell Out of Favor
The tobacco smoke enema’s decline had a specific turning point. In 1811, an English scientist named Ben Brodie demonstrated that nicotine is toxic to the heart. Once doctors understood that they were pumping a cardiac poison into their patients, the practice quickly lost credibility. It joined a long list of discarded treatments that had been accepted for decades before anyone tested whether they actually worked. If the smoke enema failed, practitioners had been instructed to fall back on artificial respiration, which, ironically, is the technique that actually saves drowning victims.
Where the Expression Comes From
It’s tempting to draw a straight line from the discredited enema to the modern insult. The story practically writes itself: doctors were literally blowing smoke into people’s backsides, the treatment turned out to be worthless, and so the phrase came to mean feeding someone nonsense. The internet loves this origin story. But linguists and fact-checkers have found no evidence to support it.
The word “smoke” has a long, independent association with deception in English and American slang. Stage magicians accomplish their tricks with “smoke and mirrors.” At various points in history, “blowing smoke” or “blowing smoke in someone’s face” meant lying or boasting, with no anatomical component involved. Slang dictionaries show no connection between smoke and posteriors before the Second World War, by which point the tobacco bellows had been forgotten for well over a century. The gap is simply too large.
Snopes investigated the claim directly and concluded, based on the complete absence of pre-1900 references linking the phrase to the medical procedure, that the saying and the practice are unrelated. The idiom’s meaning, insincere flattery and deception, lines up perfectly with the older, broader use of “smoke” as a metaphor for something that obscures the truth. It doesn’t need the enema to explain it.
Two Histories, One Phrase
So the real answer is that there are two separate stories here. One is a genuinely bizarre chapter in medical history: for roughly 40 years, trained physicians blew tobacco smoke into unconscious people as a resuscitation method, backed by government money and professional medical societies, until basic toxicology caught up with them. The other is a common English metaphor rooted in the simple, intuitive idea that smoke hides things. Both are real. They just aren’t connected.
The popular version, where the discredited medical practice directly inspired the idiom, makes for a better story. That’s probably why it spreads so easily online. But the linguistic evidence points to a simpler explanation: “smoke” has meant deception in English for centuries, and “blowing smoke” is just one more variation on that theme.