The idea of inhaling smoke?

Wait until you find out that some religious nuts want to chop off a piece of your winky when you're born :eek:
 
Sir Walter Raleigh brought it back from Southern America I believe with potatoes. A place called (Golden) Virginia. :D

The American Indians smoked a pipe as did a lot of the aboriginal tribes in that part of the globe.

EDIT. I really did enjoy smoking for the forty odd years that I partook.
 
Raymond Lin said:
The idea that leaving milk out for months and then find it later, stinks and smells like vomit, covered in mould yet that person still took a bite.
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My guess is that starvation played a role in some food discoveries, making a person desperate enough to try eating anything that's available.

Durian is a fruit that smells so bad that many places where it grows have outright bans on opening one in a public place. But someone at some point in the past tried eating it. Apparently it's pretty good eating. Quite a lot of people like the taste of it. But someone in the past had to have tried eating it with nothing to go on other than the very strong and very bad smell.
 
Having recently (this year) stopped smoking... yeah, it's odd. I don't do it any more. I enjoyed it, whilst it didn't seem to be doing me any harm, but I'm sure 30 years of it did. Maybe.

I got covid and didn't smoke for a couple of weeks and decided it would be a good time to stop. I don't feel any different btw. It's been, maybe 4 months since I've smoked.

On the other hand, it's clearly really bad for people and for some people it's a lot harder to stop than it has been for me. I stopped smoking sober about 10 years ago and never kicked it with a drink until recently. It's hard. It's really addictive.
 
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Rroff said:
Are you sure this is a historical thing?
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Now you've got me interested in that question too. It wouldn't surprise me. Drilling holes in a person's skull was used as a "medical" treatment for various things including madness. Mercury was used as a "medical" treatment for various things. So I wouldn't be surprised if the two were combined. "The past can be very strange" is certainly true.

I like reading about the past but I'm very glad I didn't live then. It wasn't the unrelenting filth, tyranny, war and short lives of oppression and squalor that it's often portrayed as being but it had a lot of shortcomings compared to here and now. With medicine being well up the list of those.
 
Mercury was used for the treatment of Syphilis which leaves horrific open sores all over the head in advanced form its doubtful trepanning was was done for that though so he's confused the two I imagine
 
Angilion said:
Now you've got me interested in that question too. It wouldn't surprise me. Drilling holes in a person's skull was used as a "medical" treatment for various things including madness. Mercury was used as a "medical" treatment for various things. So I wouldn't be surprised if the two were combined. "The past can be very strange" is certainly true.

I like reading about the past but I'm very glad I didn't live then. It wasn't the unrelenting filth, tyranny, war and short lives of oppression and squalor that it's often portrayed as being but it had a lot of shortcomings compared to here and now. With medicine being well up the list of those.
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It was mostly a light hearted rhetorical question - some of the posts/social media online I've seen of late could be explained by someone having had such a procedure carried out :s
 
Shamanism.
Smoking and getting high enough to see whatever you believed you saw.

It feels good, relaxing, even stimulating.
With practice it's not irritating.

Its a practice as old as human society itself for those where Tabasco grows naturally.

Its only very recently become taboo because of the financial cost of dealing with a population of citizens with ** please do not attempt to get around the swear filter in this way ** lungs, in the west at least.
 
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Without looking at a WIKI article I thought smoking had been done in the America's for 1000s of years and then white man invaded and bought it back.
Somebody probably burned a crop one day for religious purposes and thought 'That smells OK, lets put it into some wood with holes'.
 
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