Britain's House of Commons still keeps snuff by the door
Smoking has been banned in the House of Commons since 1693, so members who wanted tobacco took it up the nose. A rose-scented snuff is still offered at the entrance, from a box Winston Churchill donated after an air raid destroyed the original. Powdered tobacco once marked out Europe's elite.
Snuff is tobacco leaf ground to a powder and sniffed into the nose, usually from the back of the hand or a pinch between finger and thumb. The indigenous peoples of Brazil are the first known users, grinding leaves in rosewood mortars and storing the powder in sealed bone tubes. In 1493, on Columbus's second voyage, the friar Ramón Pané watched Taino and Carib people take snuff and carried some back to Spain. Seville became Europe's first centre of snuff making, later home to the Royal Tobacco Factory.
Fashion followed. Jean Nicot, the French ambassador in Lisbon, is credited with bringing snuff to Catherine de' Medici in 1561 for her headaches, and she dubbed tobacco the Queen Herb. The Dutch gave it the name snuif, and English demand jumped after the Great Plague of 1665 to 1666, when many believed it protected health. Not everyone approved: Pope Urban VIII barred it from churches, and Tsar Michael banned tobacco sales in Russia in 1643.
By the 18th century snuff separated the elite from pipe-smoking commoners. Use in England peaked under Queen Anne, and George III's wife, nicknamed Snuffy Charlotte, devoted a whole room at Windsor Castle to her supply. Napoleon, Nelson and Samuel Johnson all took it. The habit spawned a luxury trade: airtight pocket boxes holding a day's ration, table containers called mulls, and in Qing China glass bottles painted from the inside. Dark patterned handkerchiefs caught on because they hid the stains after the sneezes that experienced users regard as a novice's giveaway.
Health bodies including the World Health Organization and the UK Royal College of Physicians say that snuff, though less dangerous than smoking, is addictive, has no safe level of use and is not a safe replacement for cigarettes. It causes cancers of the mouth, oesophagus and pancreas, and 28 carcinogens have been identified in snuff products. Smokeless tobacco is linked to 650,000 deaths a year worldwide, and there is no scientific evidence that snuff helps people stop smoking.
Source: Snuff (tobacco)
