"Tobacco is medicinal plant'

Nicotiana tabacum or Tobacco is a perennial herbaceous plant. It is found only in cultivation, where it is the most commonly grown of all plants in the Nicotiana genus. Its leaves are commercially grown in many countries to be processed into tobacco. It grows to heights between 1 to 2 metres. Research is ongoing into its ancestry among wild Nicotiana species, but it is believed to be a hybrid of Nicotiana sylvestris, Nicotiana tomentosiformis and possibly Nicotiana otophora.

Tobacco was brought to Europe by Columbus in the 1500s. In other parts of the world it was known a lot earlier.

Tobacco has been used as a medicinal plant as well as for rituals and pleasure - and the tobacco plant has been regarded as both the work of the Devil and as God's gift to man.

Tobacco has played a central part in European culture across class barriers, generation gaps and country borders. Tobacco has also left its imprints on the development of trade, craft and industry.

When America was discovered, cultivation and use of tobacco for pleasure and medicinal purposes were common among the native peoples.

Columbus noted on 15 October 1492 that dried leaves were carried by a man in a canoe near the island of Ferdinandina were esteemed for their healthfulness. Tobacco has been used as disinfect and help ward off disease and fatigue. Also, it was used as an anesthetic for the trepanning operations which were frequent at that time.

In Europe the tobacco plant was first used as a medicinal plant. In the 1600s clay pipe smoking became popular and fashionable among both men and women in the 1700s.

Tobacco, probably mixed with lime or chalk, appears to have been used in these Native American populations as a toothpaste to whiten the teeth, as observed by Nino and Guerra in 1500 and by Vespucci at about the same time in Venezuela. This practice continues today in India, where powdered tobacco, or masheri, is rubbed on the teeth for this purpose and tobacco toothpaste is marketed commercially.

In 1500, a Portuguese explorer, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, in Brazil, reported the use of the herb betum for treating ulcerated abscesses, fistulas, sores, inveterate polyps and many other ailments, and said it was called the holy herb because of its powerful virtue in desperate cases. For example, in 1529, a Spanish missionary priest, Bernadino de Sahagun, collected information from four Mexican physicians about use of tobacco for medicinal purposes. He recorded that breathing the odour of fresh green leaves of the plant relieved persistent headaches. For colds and catarrh, green or powdered leaves should be rubbed around inside the mouth. Diseases of glands in the neck could be cured by cutting out the root of the lesion and placing on it crushed tobacco plant hot and mixed with salt, on the same spot.

Other reports of tobacco use by the Native Americans might be less reliable than those from contemporary sources, but in 1934 Fernando Ocaranza summed up the medicinal uses of tobacco in Mexico before 1519 as antidiarrhoeal, narcotic and emollient; he said that tobacco leaves were applied for the relief of pain, used in powdered form for the relief of catarrh and applied locally to heal wounds and burns.

There are many other reports of medicinal uses of tobacco by precolumbian Native Americans, but the foregoing list is sufficient to indicate the wide usage and to explain why travelers wished to take the plants and seeds back to Europe.