Tobacco . . . was regarded as a medicinal plant of wonderful power, a panacea and cure-all, endowed with magical properties. . . . Benzoni, who visited America about 1541, said, "See what a pestiferous and wicked poison from the devil this must be! It has happened several times to me that going through the provinces of Guatemala and Nicaragua I have entered the house of an Indian who had taken this herb, which in the Mexican language is called tobacco, and, immediately perceiving this sharp, fetid smell, I was obliged to go away in haste and seek some other place. . . . These leaves were strung together, hung in the shade and dried, and used whole or powdered, and were considered good for headaches, lockjaw, toothache, coughs, asthma, stomachache, obstructions, kidney troubles, diseases of the heart, rheumatism, the poisoning from arrows, carbuncles, polypus, consumption." Monardes, who wrote a treatise on medicinal plants in 1574, enumerates the following methods of using tobacco as a medicine: heating the leaves and applying them to the parts affected; rubbing the teeth with a rag dipped in the juice; wrapping a leaf into a pill and inserting it in the tooth; boiling the leaves; making decoctions of its leaves; making a syrup of it; smoking it by the mouth; reducing the leaves to ashes; pounding the green leaves and mixing them with oil or steeping them in vinegar; using the powder as a poultice if leaves are not to be had; making fomentations; smoking through the nose; rubbing the leaves on the afflicted parts; inserting the juice into the wound; applying bruised leaves to the wound.¹

¹Mason, J.A.n/an/an/an/a, "The Use of Tobacco in Mexico and South America," , 14–15 (rearranged).