Recalling her lone experience of smoking, Emily Vanderpool thinks that she did a better job of it than the furtive, coughing grad students in the women’s smoking room of the college library. From Jean Stafford’s “A Reading Problem” (1956):
I could smoke better than that and I was only ten; I mean the one time I had smoked I did it better — a friend and I each smoked a cubeb she had pinched from her tubercular father.Smoked a what? And why is someone with tuberculosis smoking anything? An explanation: “Wrapped in standard rice-paper, just like ordinary cigarettes, cubebs were stuffed with the dried, ground berries of a Southeast Asian relative of the pepper plant.” The cubeb was regarded as a treatment for catarrh. Wikipedia reports that cubeb cigarettes were also used to treat asthma, chronic pharyngitis, and hay fever.
[Requa’s Cubeb Cigarettes. Photograph by Joe Haupt (Flickr). Licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 License. Click for a larger view.]
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