Medicine: Cigarets and Fatigue

• Share

A moot question among physicians is the physiological effect of smoking. Only definitely established fact is that cigarets do little harm to a strong, healthy heart. Last December, Dr. Harry Louis Segal of Rochester, N.Y., who teaches in the University of Rochester's medical school, announced the results of a series of careful experiments on cigarets and fatigue. Even minuscule amounts of nicotine, he said, whether smoked in cigarets or injected directly into the veins, cause fatigue in many persons.

Last January, when news of Dr. Segal's experiments reached England, the Lancet, world's most famed medical journal, promptly pounced on them. An unsigned editorial commended Dr. Segal's objectivity, delicately sneered at his conclusions, offered a highly original explanation for smokers' fatigue. Despite the "bounding vitality and missionary fervor" of the "heroes" who stop smoking, said the editorial, it is doubtful that the drug nicotine alone produces fatigue. There is a "feeling to which an extraordinary number of people admit, that they smoke too much—that cigarets are a waste of money and so forth. . . . In sensitive men and women this mental conflict . . . may do much to take the edge off that zest for living which is supposedly normal." Prime cause of smokers' fatigue, concluded the Lancet, is not nicotine but "vague and subjective" feelings of guilt.

Last week as this theory came back across the Atlantic, Dr. Segal stood up for his experiments, prepared to refute the Lancet's psychological argument. Pointing proudly to the beaming face of one of his "heroes" he said: "That Lancet editorial must have been written by an elderly pipe-smoking Englishman of the philosophical type."