King James I was probably the first well-known opponent of smoking to go public. In his pamphlet, Counterblast to Tobacco, published 400 years ago, he described smoking as "a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless".
James was king of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland from 1603 to 1625 and was one of the more interesting monarchs to occupy that position. He was certainly something of a scholar and published on a number of the issues of the day. For instance, his treatise on witchcraft, Demonology, influenced Shakespeare's Macbeth. But he had his detractors, one of whom described him as "the wisest fool in Christendom".
Whatever about his wisdom or lack of it, his views on smoking, a habit then in its infancy in his kingdom, were interesting, entertaining and perspicacious.
Initially his pamphlet considered how "this vile custom of tobacco taking" found its way to this part of the world.
The problem was that "an inconsiderate and childish affectation of novelty" allowed it to make its insidious entry.
It was not introduced by "king, great conqueror nor learned doctor of physics," he pointed out, but he was broad-minded enough to accept that many customs of benefit to the general good had been and could be brought in by humbler mortals.
He proceeded to examine the "false and erroneous grounds" for the "loathsome and hurtful use of this stinking antidote" and then "what sins towards God, and foolish vanities before the world, you commit in the detestable use of it".
People mistakenly believed that smoking had a medical benefit. The reason was that "the brains of all men being naturally cold and wet, all dry and hot things should be good for them, of which nature this stinking suffumigation is".
But James pointed out that although man was a compound of the four "complexions", based on the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, individuals were inclined to some of these complexions more than others, and in a healthy body there was a harmony of them.
"The application then of a thing of a contrary nature to any of these parts is to interrupt them of their due function, and by consequence hurtful to the health of the whole body."
With this idea of a harmony of the "complexions" in mind, he went on to point out, logically enough, that cures ought not to be used except when needed, "the contrary whereof is daily practised in this general use of tobacco by all sorts of complexions of people".
Tobacco did not simply have a dry and hot quality but rather "a certain venomous faculty joined with the heat thereof which makes it have an antipathy against nature".
The next pro-smoking argument James was anxious to undermine was that it was "fit to purge both the head and stomach of rheums and distillations as experience teaches by the spitting and avoiding phlegm immediately after the taking of it".
His answer to this was very simple: "this stinking smoke being sucked up by the nose and imprisoned in the cold and moist brains is by their cold and wet faculty turned and cast forth again in watery distillations, and so are you made free and purged of nothing but that wherewith you wilfully burdened yourselves." Next, he set himself to counter the contention that if a people as a whole take something up, if must be good for them.
But people can be foolishly drawn to imitate any novelty, he maintained. Look, for example, at how new styles of clothing become the fashion.
"For such is the force of that natural self-love in every one of us, and such is the corruption of envy bred in the breast of every one of us as we cannot be content unless we imitate everything that our fellows do, and so prove ourselves capable of everything whereof they are capable, like apes counterfeiting the manners of others to our own destruction."
He went on to dismiss the notion that smoking could cure many different diseases: "And what greater absurdity can there be than to say that one cure shall serve for divers and contrarious sorts of diseases?"
The claims for the miraculous nature of tobacco caused him to resort to a sarcastic litany, during which he managed to take a swipe at both Catholics and Puritans: "It helps all sorts of agues; it makes a man sober that was drunk; it refreshes a weary man, and yet makes a man hungry; being taken when they go to bed, it makes one sleep soundly and yet being taken when a man is sleepy and drowsy, it will, as they say, awaken his brain and quicken his understanding . Oh, the omnipotent power of tobacco! And if it could by the smoke thereof chase out devils . . . it would serve for a precious relic, both for the superstitious priests and insolent Puritans, to call out devils withal."
Smokers, to James's mind, committed such sins as lust (for tobacco), drunkenness (the effect of tobacco on the brain was akin to the effect of strong liquor), dishonouring the Sabbath (by not refraining on that day), and wasting their worldly goods (by spending money on the habit).
They also polluted their meal tables, their breaths and their wives' complexions and breaths.
(The husband should be ashamed "to reduce his delicate, wholesome and clear-complexioned wife to that extremity that either she must also corrupt her sweet breath therewith or else resolve to live in a perpetual stinking torment".) Now that the smoking ban is here, workers will no longer have to live in a perpetual stinking torment. James I would have approved of Micheál Martin.