I’m working on two different projects at the moment, one about poison, the other about colonial America, so I’ve been reading a lot about tobacco.By the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Jamestown colonists figured out how to grow tobacco, pipe smoking quickly became extremely popular in England. It was smoked in long clay pipes.Tobacco was widely thought to be a sort of miracle drug for all sorts of ailments, from head colds to cancer. A special kind of medicinal enema forced tobacco smoke up a person’s “back end.” Here’s a “tobacco clyster,” used to resuscitate drowning victims. Smoking really took off during the plague of 1665. Children were sent to school with pipes. Those who didn’t know how to smoke were instructed by the teacher.

You can’t make this stuff up.In France and Spain, snuff was more popular than smoking. If you think about it, sniffing the powdered form of tobacco would be a lot more convenient than smoking it, before matches were available. By the 1770s, London tobacco sellers sold 80 percent snuff and only 20 percent pipe tobacco. It wasn’t until the first decade of the nineteenth century that matches were invented and cigars showed up. Cigarettes became popular around the turn of the next century.