When ‘Blowing Smoke Up Your Ass’ Was a Real Thing

 

This neat little box containing a pair of bellows and a variety of pipes and other fixtures is an 18th-century tobacco resuscitation kit, approved for use and distributed by the Royal Humane Society of London, which was then It was formally known as the Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons. Tobacco was believed to have invigorating properties and the ability to absorb moisture and warm the body from within. Thus, blowing tobacco smoke through various orifices of the human body was the recommended procedure for reviving the apparently lifeless body of a drowned victim. The bellows in the kit enabled the physician or reviver to pump tobacco smoke through various nozzles that were ideally designed to fit the victim's nose and rectum.

Before the mid-18th century, falling into water and being unable to swim meant certain death because even if the victim was rescued, there was no clearly agreed upon method for reviving the unconscious. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was still a new and exotic thing, and modern CPR technology was centuries away.

In 1745, the English physician John Fothergill gave the first lecture on mouth-to-mouth ventilation, citing the work of the Scottish surgeon, William Tosch, who once revived a patient suffering from the smoke of burning coal. Within a short time, pumping air into the lungs of drowning victims became common practice.

Around this time, word spread that North American Indians used tobacco as a medicine to cure a variety of ailments. Apart from inhaling the smoke of burnt tobacco leaves, another process was to expel the smoke through the rectum. European doctors thought it was a good idea to revive drowned people, because smoke was hot and drowned people needed warmth.

To experiment with the new principle, physician William Hawes, in 1773, began offering a reward to any person rescued from the water within a reasonable time of immersion. Hawes apparently had a successful enough revival to form the Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons the following year, together with another physician, Thomas Cogan. Later, the Society became the Royal Humane Society and branches were opened throughout the country, but mainly in ports and coastal towns where the risk of drowning was high. By the end of the 19th century, the Society had over 280 depots across Britain, equipped with life-saving tobacco smoke blowing equipment. These devices were installed along the banks of the River Thames in London in the same way that defibrillators are found in public places today.

By the end of the 19th century, enemas of tobacco smoke had become an established practice in Western medicine, treating not only drowning victims, but many other ailments such as headaches, respiratory failure, cramps, colds, hernias, and stomach cramps. He also treated diseases.

The practice of enemas with tobacco smoke soon fell out of use when, in 1811, the English scientist Ben Brodie discovered that nicotine was toxic to the heart, although the irritating smoke had been used for respiratory therapy for more than a century. Continued.