Diary of John Adams, volume 1
1756-03-12
Clowdy. Laid a pair of Gloves with Mrs. Willard that she would not see me chew tobacco this month.1
We do not know who won this wager. We do know something about JA’s use of tobacco. In 1805 his friend Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse of the Harvard Medical School published a tract entitled Cautions to Young Persons concerning 13Health in a Public Lecture...; containing the General Doctrine of Chronic Diseases; Shewing the Evil Tendency of the Use of Tobacco upon Young Persons; More Especially the Pernicious Effects of Smoking Cigarrs. The lecture had been delivered to Harvard undergraduates, and in it Waterhouse declared that in his twenty-three years at Harvard he had never observed “so many palid faces, and so many marks of declining health; nor ever knew so many hectical habits and consumptive affections” among the students as now (p. 27). These he attributed in large measure to the increasing use of tobacco. A copy sent by the author to JA evoked several letters of reminiscence, in which among other things JA said he had “learned the Use of