Laudator Temporis Acti

Joseph P. Byrne, Daily Life During the Black Death (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006), p. 50, with note on p. 62:

Tobacco, which arrived in Europe from the Western Hemisphere, was also quickly adopted as a personal fumigant during the sixteenth century. Paintings and illustrations of plague scenes feature minor figures puffing away on pipes as they carry corpses or read lists of dead at the pest-house gate. The Dutch physician Isbrandus van Diemerbroeck preached the use of tobacco during the 1630s. During the epidemic of 1635–1636 he routinely smoked two or three bowls after breakfast, three after lunch, and "always in the presence of infected corpses." In London during the Great Plague of 1665 rumor had it that tobacconists never caught the plague. In early June the naval administrator and diarist Samuel Pepys came across the first houses he had seen marked with the red X indicating plague victims: "It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chaw—which took away the apprehension."¹⁷ At the famed boys' school in nearby Eton, all students had to smoke or risk flogging.

17. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 197; Robert Latham and Williams Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. VI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 120.