Tobacco in Folk Cures in Western Society

PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT about the folklore o£ tobacco is that the white man did not know about it until after the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, although smoke-usage and even smoking of a sort had a faint parallel in Europe. Europeans had used smoke in the form of incense at least since the days of the Egyptians, and the Scythians and Thracians discovered early the narcotic effect of burning hemp seed. Hippocrates prescribed the inhalation of smoke for female diseases, and Pliny later recommended sucking-up the smoke from burning coltsfoot through reeds as a cure for coughs (a cure which lasted into modern times), but these usages were isolated and limited. Smoking as we know it did not exist, and tobacco itself, all-pervasive as it is in contemporary limes, had to wait until that day in 1492 before Europeans became aware of it. Thus, any European folklore about tobacco is no more than four hundred and seventy-two years old—an important fact for the folklorist, for it means that he sometimes can trace usages to their origins instead of having to conjecture about them in remote antiquity. It means further that if he would understand those usages, he would do well to look at the intellectual climate of Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries

Ancient history · Art · Folk religion · Sociology · Traditional medicine · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Medicine

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