Inside the book

This 1626 issue of the first French edition retains the splendid series of nine engraved plates first published with the 1625 issue, among the earliest European depictions of tobacco and its cultivation and use around the world. The images, executed in the clear, linear manner characteristic of early scientific illustration, combine the instructional clarity of a herbal with the curiosity of an ethnographic record. They are conventionally attributed to Moses van Uyttenbroeck, although the French edition does not name the artist. The first three charming botanical plates include “Tabac mâle” and “Tabac femelle,” presented as botanical portraits with verses beneath the figures. They are followed by three especially notable scenes depicting Native Americans cultivating and curing tobacco, illustrating successive stages of cultivation, drying, and preparation of the leaves, with careful representations of tools, baskets, and processing arrangements. The final three engravings are equally remarkable, depicting various pipes and the Persian kalian, among the earliest printed representations of these smoking instruments in Europe. The engraver’s sharp outlines, delicate shading, and slight naïveté give the series a distinctly seventeenth-century character, poised between scientific treatise and decorative art. The text begins with Neander’s systematic discussion of the names and origins of tobacco, its different varieties and qualities, the proper seasons for planting and harvesting, and methods of preparation. Among these is the preparation called Caldo (p. 26 ff.), a medicinal mixture based on a fermented drink, ginger powder, and other spices. The resulting preparation was stored in closed vessels, and tobacco leaves could be dipped into it to impart a particular “vigor.” Subsequent sections examine tobacco as a medicinal herb, antidote, and near-universal remedy, accompanied by accounts from the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. Neander was firmly opposed to the recreational use of tobacco, regarding habitual consumption as physiologically harmful and socially dangerous, much like excessive drinking. He instead advocated tobacco strictly for medicinal purposes, including the treatment of wounds, ulcers, and numerous other ailments. He even recommended it as an eye remedy capable, he claimed, of restoring sharp vision to elderly patients. So extensive were the virtues he attributed to the plant that he called it a “divine herb” and “holy grass.” Neander also emphasizes the role of his countrymen in introducing tobacco from the Americas and recommends long pipes, such as those used by Native Americans and Persians, which allowed the smoke to cool before inhalation. The treatise proceeds with remedies for headaches, coughs, asthma, gout, constipation, stones, ulcers, pains of childbirth, and numerous other complaints: tobacco is presented not principally as a pleasure, but as a remarkably versatile medicine.