Friday, August 12, 2011

No Smoking again

You see more and more signs like this....first saw them outside of hospitals and other public buildings, now apartment buildings are posting them too.

Wikipedia has some historical insight:

History of opposition to smoking

Pope Urban VII's 13-day papal reign included the world's first known public smoking ban in 1590 when he threatened to excommunicate anyone who "took tobacco in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose".[2] The earliest citywide European smoking bans were enacted in Bavaria, Kursachsen, and certain parts of Austria in the late 17th century.
In 1604, King James I of England wrote A Counterblast to Tobacco, where he described smoking as: "A custome loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmeful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomeless."
Smoking was banned in Berlin in 1723, in Königsberg in 1742, and in Stettin in 1744. These bans were repealed in the revolutions of 1848.[3]
Although not a government entity, in 1833 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints introduced the Word of Wisdom into its doctrine, which in addition to other things, said that tobacco should not be smoked or chewed.
The Nazi Party imposed a tobacco ban in every German university, post office, military hospital and Nazi Party office, under the auspices of Karl Astel's Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research, created in 1941 under orders from Adolf Hitler.[4] Major anti-tobacco campaigns were widely broadcast by the Nazis until the demise of the regime in 1945.[5]

 




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