The Congregationalist

Tobacco.

The last number of the Medical Journal contains another letter from Dr. Woodward, on the influence of tobacco on the voice and health, in which it is pretty clearly demonstrated that this disgusting and nauseous weed, used either in chewing, smoking or snuffling, has destroyed more lives and broken down the health of more useful members of society, than have been sufferers from the loss of voice, up to the present time, or that there ever will be hereafter. The following is one of the evidences, which Dr. Woodward produces in support of his theory:—

The first instance of the loss of voice in a public speaker, that came to my knowledge, was Chief Justice Reeve, of the Supreme Court in Connecticut. He was an eminent lawyer, had an extensive business, and was as distinguished as an advocate, as he was for erudition and legal science. Judge Reeve lost his voice at about the age of sixty; he never afterwards spoke excepting in a whisper. He lived to the age of about eighty years. Till seventy years of age, he was Judge of the Court, and many years of the time Chief Justice. He had, at the time, a large and respectable law school, at which many a son of Massachusetts, and most others throughout the Union, received most valuable instruction, in his distinct and audible whisper. The writer has frequently heard him give "learned opinions" in the same manner from the bench, and charge a jury so that not one syllable of his luminous view of the "law and testimony" was lost by them. He continued to deliver his course of law lectures, till seventy-five years of age.

In early and middle life Judge Reeve was in the habit of smoking tobacco, "which habit," says my respectable and venerable correspondent, "he afterwards changed to taking snuff. This as is usual increased upon him, until he used it to great excess; he took snuff for the last fifteen or twenty years of his life."

I relate this case to show that the loss of voice is not exclusively confined to ministers and that even lawyers are not always protected from the evil by smoking, or cured by snuffing tobacco. Indeed I have yet to learn that lawyers more frequently use tobacco than gentlemen of the other professions and other callings in life. That the practice is less in favor than formerly, with all classes of society, admits of no question. Thirty years ago a large proportion of the females in every community used tobacco by smoking or snuffling. Now these filthy practices are universally abandoned by the sex: and yet not one individual, to my knowledge has lost her voice, although it cannot be denied that some of them speak "long and loud."

—Boston Courier.