“Tabacologia”: a book by Johann Neander| Tabaccologia

Introduction

Johann Neander or Johannes Neander (c. 1596 Bremen – c. 1630) was a German physician from Bremen, also a philosopher, writer and poet, best known for his work: Tabacologia: hoc est, tabaci, seu nicotianæ descriptio medico-cheirurgico-pharmaceutica: vel eius præparatio .

The book was published in 1622 in a very first and restricted edition in the Netherlands and in a second and very popular edition in 1626 by Isaac Elzevir of Leiden, also in Latin, the academic language of the learned in those days. After a while the French edition came, while the English one did so much later. Until now, there has never been an edition in Italian [1-3].

Neander published, in addition to Tabacologia, also other works such as Syntagma in quo antiquissimae et nobilissimae medicinae natalitia, sectae earumque placita etc. depinguntur in 1626 and Sassafrasologia published in 1627, must be attributed to him.

It is necessary to differentiate him from Michael Neander, physician and physicist of Jena, of whom we have the work Synopsis mensurarum et ponderum, ponderationisque mensurabilium secundum Romanos, Athenienses, Geōrgus, kai hippoïatrus, published in Basilea in 1555, from Theophilus Neander whose work Heptas Alchemica, published in Halle in 1621, and from Michael Neander, pseudonym of the humanist, Lutheran pedagogue and Protestant theologist, Michael Neumann (Sorau, Lower Lusatia, 1525 - Ilfeld 1595), disciple of Luther and Melanchthon.

Book content

The work Tabacologia by Johan Neander, of 256 pages, accompanied by magnificent engravings, is important in its genre because it collects everything that until the early seventeenth century had been written about tobacco as a therapeutic agent, already by its predecessors and contemporary authors. It is interesting because it quotes the names of numerous other authors who had dealt with the subject of tobacco and used the related therapeutic remedies used this therapy, from which we learn how they took it into account and how the relative recipes were drawn up.

As for other treatments of this kind, the therapeutic formulary is preceded by a complete description of tobacco, accompanied by magnificent engravings – by Moses van Uyttenbroeck (c.1600-1646), Dutch painter and engraver – in the paragraphs so called: Nominum ratio, differentiae, tempus, locus, praeparatio foliorum vires. Neander’s work praised the healing virtues of tobacco, but also warned of the dangers inherent of its abuse; he defined tobacco as “a plant created by God himself, but the devil is also involved as the excesses ruined both the mind and the body”.

Neander, in fact, opposed the recreational use of tobacco, considering its habitual use as physiologically harmful and socially dangerous in a similar way to alcohol. Instead, he approved its use in multiple medical applications, including treatments for wounds, ulcers, and other diseases. He considered it useful as eye drops for optical problems, restoring the sharpness of vision even for elderly patients. In fact, there were few non-fatal diseases for which tobacco did not serve as a remedy. In this he shared the common views expressed by Liebault, Monardes and Everard.

The second half of the book includes numerous recipes that include other medical ingredients and flavorings.

Neander was particularly interested in the curative uses of tobacco, and his work describes many of these remedies in detail. Although the book does not offer much information about the plant, it contains three remarkable illustrations depicting Native American techniques for growing tobacco [4]. One illustration shows young Native Americans picking, drying, and boiling tobacco leaves. From this he took inspiration to prepare a medical potion with the help of a fermented drink, ginger powder, and other spices. The resulting product was stored in closed containers, and tobacco leaves could be dipped in it to obtain a special “vigor”; the Spaniards called this product hot. Neander, like most of the medical practitioners of that time, attributed to the tobacco plant amazing qualities, to a point to name it “divine herb” and “holy grass”. The text presents recipes on the use of tobacco to treat headaches, coughs, asthma, gout, constipation, stones, ulcers, birth pains, etc. In short, tobacco was experienced as a real remedy.

Sander L. Gilma and X, in his treatise Smoke: a global history of smoking notes the presence of “a drawing by any Persian included in the oldest European compendium on tobacco, Tabacology, written by Johan Neander”. He then analyzes and admires the quality of the images that “contrary to what one might expect, are not of primitive and crude workmanship, improvised by coconut shells, but of highly elaborate and intricate devices. The high-quality craftsmanship suggests a relatively long process of technical advancement and aesthetic refinement” [5].

Dissemination of the work

Although, for obvious reasons, measuring readership was difficult in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Neander’s book was apparently popular. It was important enough to be reprinted in 1626, after the very first and short edition printed in the Netherlands and included in a work on herbs two decades after its first appearance. A translation in French was so popular that it was reprinted four times between 1625 and 1630. The text first appeared in an English translation in 1659; until then academic British readers could study Neander’s text in its original Latin language [4]. There is no news, to date, of a translation into Italian language occurred in the last 400 years.

Tabaccologia:a four-century-old neologism

The work of Neander Tabacologia, assumes today, for tobacco cessation specialists and researchers of History of Medicine, a fundamental historical importance both for the presence of the neologism, “tabaccologia”, actually four centuries old, which gives the title to the work itself, and because it summarizes all the various knowledge on tobacco and its medicinal virtues until then acquired by the medical academics of the time, just over 100 years after the discovery of the New World and the introduction of tobacco in Europe. This volume is the first in the world to introduce the word “tabaccologia”. Its interest in the modern reader is undeniable: it is the first witness of how this herb, tobacco precisely, was “lived” upon its arrival in the old continent. An expression that would summarize, from then on, a new discipline for the study of tobacco, prevention and therapy of smoking and smoking-related diseases. A science that laboriously in the following centuries, despite the adverse thrusts of the multinational tobacco industries, overflowing with power in the twentieth century, has brought forward, with the strength of scientific evidence, knowledge, and proposals such as to condition many nations to enact regulations for the protection, at least of non-smokers, while creating smoking cessation therapeutic programs. This word appears for the first time in the XX^th century when Professor Robert Molimard, with the attitude of the researcher and the daring classicist, founded in the mid-80s the Societé de Tabacologie. In the wake of our French colleagues, we also borrowed this apparent neologism, when on December 13, 1999 we founded the Italian Society of Tobaccology and in 2002 Tabaccologia, the official scientific periodical of the Society [6]; realized that we were using a new word, a neologism, since it was not yet reported in dictionaries or encyclopedias; even Google gave zero items. In fact, the lemma “tabaccologia” was a new word that departed from the lexical standard of the terminologies dedicated to medicine that derive from Greek and Latin.

The Greeks and Latins, of course, did not know tobacco, and when they used the verb to smoke, they did so for things that burned (ruinae fumantes urbis befitting a city that had been set on fire). And just thinking that men would one day release smoke from their mouths and nostrils by sucking it out of a rolled foil of shredded dry leaves, they would probably have enjoyed thinking of it as a funny thing. Tobacco was the ingredient with which a corn cob (sicàr) was rolled up and lit at one end and sucked in at the other. The natives attributed primordial values to fire, using its magical symbols, practices that have survived from the Mayans and Aztecs to this day. When Carl von Linnée (Linnaeus) proceeded to the systematic and nosological classification of living species, he showed a certain creativity in the attribution of the name of that particular plant: he called it “nicotiana” (genus) in memory of Jean Nicot, French ambassador in Portugal, who had donated it to Catherine de’ Medici, thus giving primary dignity to the plant, and “tabacum” (species) in relation to the original lexicon that had meanwhile spread in the European continent.

Other species of that plant were discovered but “tabacco”, “tabaco”, “tobacco” and “tabac” identifies them all in generic form in the various languages, Italian, Spanish, English, and French. “tobacco” and logos therefore represent the two possible lemmas able to define the science that gravitates around Tobacco, from botany to agronomy, from the processing process to consumption, from economics to public safety (smuggling), from smoking-related diseases to litigation. On the other hand, “smoking”, a term that serves to define more specifically tobacco addiction, began to spread only after the seventies of the twentieth century. In those decades, however, tobacco (together with cocoa and coffee) revolutionized the daily life of the old continent: the first places where coffee was served and smoking were opened, while the authorities were everywhere creating tobacco monopolies to enrich the coffers of the State (the English one was born in 1624, the French one in 1674). The spread of tobacco encountered at the same time several obstacles of a religious and political nature, but despite some isolated attempts to prohibit its consumption (in some Swiss cantons its consumption was punished with the pillory and prison, in Russia even, for a certain period, with the death penalty), over the decades its consumption established itself to become, in the twentieth century, a status symbol for consumers and a business for producers. Showing the modern reader this important volume, especially because its theses are completely unreliable, can also help to understand how it was possible that for three centuries the damage of tobacco was not studied, identified and denounced.

The Latin saying “audentes fortuna iuvat” (fortune favors the bold) [7] materialized at the dawn of the new millennium when we managed to definitively “clear” the word “tabaccologia” from “neologism” to “400 year old neologism”, with a stroke of luck that rewarded the research I was conducting on tobacco in the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [8].

I remember that it was an exciting moment when in 2001 I found, almost by chance, the title of this book by Neander in the Library of the Archiginnasio in Bologna. The emotion was even greater when the librarian of the National Library of Rome, where one of the few originals in the world was kept, brought it to me to view it and then digitize it; we have created an Italian version, but we hope to be able to send it to print, as soon as possible, in the double Latin and Italian version.

Tobaccology, whether clinical, preventive, social or forensic, is a science of the new millennium, born along the path of the history of tobacco made up of cultural celebrations, advertising promotion, and many deaths and patients, more than you can imagine, a massacre three times greater than that caused by alcohol; leading cause of avoidable death in the world, among those which are non-transmissible, for what the WHO calls “Tobacco Epidemic” but that we think is more correct because more realistic to speak of “Tobacco Pandemic”, given the planetary spread of tobacco use, with a huge toll of 8 million deaths per year [9].

It does not become science because of and in function of smoking. It is science that serves to understand and interpret the universe of tobacco and its repercussions on the human, economic, social, legislative level, so that the myth ceases and the awareness of reality grows.

References

1. Virtual International Authority File. Johannes Neader.Publisher Full Text
2. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Johannes Nader.Publisher Full Text
3. Internet Archive. Tabacologia: hoc est, tabaci, seu nicotianæ descriptio medico-cheirurgico-pharmaceutica: vel eius præparatio & usus in omnibus corporis humani incommodis.Publisher Full Text
4. Sokol Books Ltd. Neander, Johann, [Catelan, Laurent].Publisher Full Text
5. Gilman SL, Xun Z. Smoke: a global history of smoking. Reaktion Books: Londra; 2004.
6. Mangiaracina G. Tabaccologia: my first 20 years. Tabaccologia. 2022; XX(3):3-5.
7. Marone PV. Eneide. X. Einaudi: Torino; 2014.
8. Zagà V. Tobaccology 20 years: past, present and future. Tabaccologia. 2022; XX(4):3-6.
9. Zagà V, Gorini G, Amram DL, Gallus S, Cattaruzza MS. Tobacco Epidemic or Pandemic?. Tabaccologia. 2020; XVIII(4):3-4.