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On the evening of Saturday 31 August 1901, the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust wrote to his mother with characteristic intimacy, recounting his struggle to quell a severe attack of asthma the previous day. Having suffered from periodic attacks of asthma since the age of nine, Proust was familiar with the range of contemporary treatments for the condition: over the years, he had been prescribed opium, caffeine, iodine, and morphine (which had once been injected by his father, Dr Adrien Proust), his nose had been cauterized numerous times, he had adopted a milk diet, and he had occasionally attempted to relieve both his asthma and his hay fever by visiting health resorts, such as Evian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva. However, as his note to his mother suggests, Proust's favoured remedy involved the inhalation of smoke from anti-asthma cigarettes or powders:
Ma chère petite Maman,
'Misery of miseries or mystery of mysteries?' That is the title of a chapter in one of Dumas's novels, which would apply very well to me at the moment. Yesterday after I wrote to you I had an attack of asthma and incessant running at the nose, which obliged me to walk all doubled up and light anti-asthma cigarettes at every tobacconist's I passed, etc. And what's worse, I haven't been able to go to bed till midnight, after endless fumigations, and it's three or four hours after a real summer attack, an unheard of thing for me.1
Proust was not alone in attempting to relieve his asthma with medicated cigarettes or combustible powders. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the inhalation of fumes from burning preparations of stramonium, lobelia, tobacco, and potash became increasingly popular amongst asthmatics and their physicians throughout the world. Of course, a growing clinical reliance on anti-asthma smoking remedies of this nature did not occur in a social or cultural vacuum. The preference for inhaling smoke from stramonium and other substances coincided precisely both with the gradual increase in smoking cannabis and opium for recreational and medical purposes and with the rising popularity of smoking tobacco, initially in pipes and cigars and, after the introduction of mass production techniques in the 1880s, in the form of cigarettes. As Matthew Hilton has argued,...