Human kind - slow to learn

Skull with a Burning Cigarette by Vincent van Gogh, oil on canvas, 1885.

In Ben Jonson play Bartolomew Fair (1614)  he has one onf his characters 'Overdo' rail, in what sounds like a contemporary campaign against smoking: 

“Hence it is that the lungs of the tobacconist are rotted, the liver spotted, the brain smoked like the backside of the pig-woman’s booth here.” “Neither do thou lust after that tawny weed, tobacco. . . Whose complexion is like the Indian’s that vents it! . . . And who can tell,if, before the gathering and making up thereof, the alligator hath not pissed thereon?”

Bartholomew Fair 

Jonson said all in this 1614, Yet in 2012, as one walks around London you see so many people smoking, more often than not, it is young girls huddled in doorways having their 'smoking break'.



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