Nicot

Jean Nicot de Villemain was born around 1530 in Nîmes and rose through French court circles to become ambassador to Portugal in 1559. Lisbon was then the hub of Europe's trade with its Atlantic colonies, and through it flowed exotic specimens from the New World. Nicot encountered tobacco plants, recently introduced from Brazil and Florida, at the Lisbon garden of Damião de Góis, a Portuguese scholar. Intrigued by reports of its medicinal properties, Nicot obtained seeds and began cultivating the plant and experimenting with it on his household staff.

Nicot sent dried tobacco leaves and seeds to Catherine de' Medici, Queen Mother of France, around 1560, recommending them as a treatment for her migraines. He also reported success treating a growth on the face of a courtier. Catherine adopted tobacco medicinally, and the plant's reputation as a cure-all spread rapidly through French aristocratic society. For decades, tobacco was called 'herbe à Nicot' (Nicot's herb) or 'nicotiane' in French. The botanist Jacques Daléchamps formalized this in 1586, naming the tobacco genus Nicotiana in Nicot's honor—the name that Carl Linnaeus preserved in his 1753 classification.

Nicotine as a distinct chemical compound was first isolated in 1828 by German chemists Wilhelm Heinrich Posselt and Karl Ludwig Reimann, who extracted the alkaloid from tobacco leaves and named it after the plant genus—and therefore, indirectly, after Jean Nicot. They correctly identified it as toxic; its addictive properties were not well understood for another century. Nicot himself never smoked; he used tobacco as a poultice and a powder, consistent with its early medicinal reputation. He compiled the first major French dictionary, the 'Thresor de la langue françoyse,' published posthumously in 1606.

The alkaloid Nicot inadvertently named kills over 8 million people annually through tobacco-related disease. He sent a plant he believed was a medicine to a queen who suffered from headaches. The plant was adopted by Europeans as a pleasure and then as a compulsion, the alkaloid creating one of the most persistent addictions in human history. Nicot's name is now inseparable from addiction, illness, and the global tobacco industry—none of which he could have anticipated, and none of which he experienced himself.