Tobacco in the 1800s served far more purposes than simple recreation. It was a medicine, an insecticide, a social ritual, and one of the most economically important crops in the world. While smoking and chewing were the most visible uses, doctors also prescribed tobacco for asthma, applied it to wounds, and even blew tobacco smoke into the bodies of drowning victims in an attempt to revive them. The century began with tobacco as a versatile folk remedy and ended with the invention of a machine that would turn cigarettes into a mass-market product.
A Widely Trusted Medicine
For much of the 1800s, tobacco was considered a legitimate medical tool. Physicians recommended it for a surprisingly wide range of conditions, building on centuries of use that stretched back to early European contact with the Americas. Tobacco leaves were crushed and applied directly to wounds, burns, and slow-spreading skin ulcers. One common preparation involved stamping fresh leaves in a mortar and mixing the juice with wax, rosin, and oil to create a healing salve. Practitioners reported that stubborn ulcerated legs and spreading skin lesions healed within eight to twelve days of treatment.
Tobacco was also used as a poultice for toothaches and, when mixed with lime or chalk, as a tooth-whitening paste. Powdered tobacco was inhaled to clear nasal congestion. These remedies were not fringe practices. They were part of mainstream medicine, passed down from observations of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and refined by European physicians over several centuries.
One of the more dramatic medical applications was the tobacco smoke enema, used primarily on drowning victims pulled from the water with no signs of life. Rescuers used specially designed bellows to force tobacco smoke into the patient’s rectum, believing the irritation and warmth would stimulate breathing. Governments in cities like Venice invested considerable money in distributing these resuscitation devices and training people to use them. The practice eventually fell out of favor, but it was taken seriously enough in the late 1700s and early 1800s that it shaped early public health policy around emergency response.
Smoking for Asthma and Breathing Problems
Throughout the late 1800s, tobacco was a key ingredient in commercial remedies marketed to people with asthma. These products combined tobacco with stramonium (a plant from the nightshade family), lobelia, potash, and sometimes arsenic. Patients smoked these mixtures during asthma attacks, and many reported almost immediate relief from the spasms that tightened their airways.
The logic behind this was not entirely unfounded. René Laennec, the French physician who invented the stethoscope, believed asthma was caused by spasmodic constriction of the airways rather than mucus buildup. He recommended a range of substances he considered anti-spasmodic, including tobacco, opium, belladonna, and coffee. Products like Potter’s Asthma Cure, Himrod’s Cure for Asthma, and Asthmador Cigarettes were sold over the counter in most Western countries and advertised aggressively in both medical journals and popular newspapers. For decades, “medical cigarettes” were a standard part of asthma management.
Chewing, Pipes, and the Rise of Cigarettes
Recreational tobacco use in the 1800s looked nothing like it does today. For most of the century, chewing tobacco dominated American consumption. Men chewed throughout the day, and spittoons became fixtures in saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and railway carriages. Many cities passed laws against spitting in public spaces, imposing fines of one to ten dollars, but enforcement was almost nonexistent. Some citizens objected to anti-spitting ordinances as an infringement on personal liberty. By 1906, the federal government was still trying to stop people from spitting on the floors of federal buildings.
Pipe smoking was the other major form of consumption for much of the century. Among Indigenous communities on the plains and prairies, the shift from locally grown wild tobacco to the milder commercial variety (which was easier to inhale and more addictive) accelerated as railroads made distribution cheap and efficient by mid-century. By the end of the 1800s, observers noted that cigarettes were rapidly replacing the traditional pipe among the Sioux and other nations, a change that alarmed Indian Affairs officials at the time.
The cigarette’s transformation from a niche product to a mass commodity happened in the final two decades of the century. James Bonsack, a Virginia inventor, patented a cigarette-rolling machine in 1881. A single machine could produce as many cigarettes as 48 people rolling by hand. When a skilled mechanic improved the devices installed at the W. Duke, Sons, and Company factory in Durham, North Carolina, that single factory could turn out four million cigarettes per day. Allen and Ginter, the Richmond firm that first tested the machine, ironically declined to adopt it throughout their factory and kept selling expensive hand-rolled cigarettes. They lost the mass market to Duke and other North Carolina manufacturers who embraced cheap, machine-made cigarettes.
Women and Tobacco in the 1800s
Women’s tobacco use in the 1800s was far more common than popular memory suggests, though it followed different social rules than men’s. In the American South during the mid-nineteenth century, many younger women took up snuff dipping, placing finely ground tobacco between the lip and gum using small brushes. This was a conscious move away from the pipe smoking that their mothers’ generation had practiced. Snuff dipping was widespread enough that Union soldiers serving in the South during the Civil War frequently mentioned it in letters and diaries, often with a mix of amusement and disgust. Snuff boxes and specially made brushes were common personal items for Southern women of this era.
Pest Control on Farms
Tobacco had a practical life outside of human consumption. Farmers in the 1800s used tobacco extracts as an insecticide, taking advantage of nicotine’s toxicity to insects and parasites. Leaves were boiled in water to create a concentrated liquid that could be applied to crops and animals to kill pests. This was not a minor folk practice. Nicotine-based pesticides remained in use well into the twentieth century. A preparation of nicotine salicylate eventually replaced the cruder leaf infusions, but the principle was the same: nicotine is a potent natural poison that kills insects, ticks, fleas, and parasitic worms at concentrations that (people assumed) were safe for larger animals and humans.
Early Warnings About Tobacco’s Dangers
The 1800s were not entirely credulous about tobacco. By mid-century, medical investigators were starting to document its harms, particularly among the people who manufactured it. In 1843, F. Mélier, personal physician to Napoleon II and inspector general of French health services, presented a detailed report to the Royal Academy of Medicine in Paris on the health of tobacco factory workers. He visited Paris tobacco factories repeatedly, studying every stage of production. He identified the fermentation of tobacco leaves as especially dangerous, noting the release of ammonia, acetic acid, and nicotine into the air. He tested nicotine on animals in liquid form and declared it a poisonous substance.
Mélier observed that workers exposed to tobacco during fermentation and pulverization developed a characteristic gray skin tone, which he interpreted as a sign of changes in the blood. A follow-up report in 1866 by the physician Ygonin noted ongoing cases of wasting, dysentery, insomnia, nausea, and loss of appetite among tobacco workers, even as improvements in factory technology had reduced the severity of symptoms compared to earlier decades. These were occupational health studies, not anti-smoking campaigns, but they planted the seeds of medical skepticism that would grow dramatically in the century to follow.