Some people, like the Victorian novelist Thomas De Quincey, perhaps smoked a bit too much. De Quincey started taking opium in 1804, and four years later found himself addicted. Even so, he could not stop himself from praising its exquisite pleasures. In 1821, he published his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in which he makes clear exactly what the scientists had hoped to accomplish. But his experience went well beyond science, and sounds, in its images of rebirth, vaguely like Paracelsus: “What a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes: this negative effect was swallowed up . . . in the abyss of the divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea . . . for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness . . . ”
America had no De Quincey. No one championed opium as the gateway to insight. Americans went after opium purely for enjoyment and recreation. And so, helped along in great part by the Chinese, who opened smoking dens in great numbers in the Far West during the 1849 rush for gold, opium attracted more users in America than in England. In 1870, in the United States, opium was more widely available than tobacco was in 1970. The Union Army issued over ten million opium pills and two million ounces of powdered opium to its soldiers. Both Kit Carson and Wild Bill Hickock wrote in their diaries how they passed many pleasant hours in those opium dens, much preferring smoking opium to drinking whiskey. Smoking left them with no hangover and, as a bonus, sharpened their shooting and roping skills to such a point, Hickock claimed, that he could perform their sometimes dangerous cowboy shows with not a trace of fear. In fact, he claimed invisibility on the stage. At the end of the nineteenth century, even the distinguished Canadian physician Sir William Osler, professor of medicine at Oxford, declared opium “God’s own medicine,” for, he said, it could perform miracles, not the least of which was curing all of the world’s ills.
Shortly after the Academy awarded its prize, a German chemist named Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner, eager to find in that magic poppy the active ingredient—termed its “essence” or “basic principle”—isolated an alkaloid from raw opium in 1805. He named it “morphium,” after Morpheus, the god of dreams; later it became known as morphine. For many years, Sertürner experimented on himself, trumpeting the drug’s ability to eliminate all worry and pain. At one moment, Sertürner wrote, morphine could induce feelings of a state so foreign and so elusive that the philosophers had to coin a new word to describe it, euphoria. But, he added, sounding a bit like De Quincey, the very next moment it could make him feel “outright terrible”5—pitching him into a depression so dark and heavy and deep that it resembled a near-death experience. And then there it was again, something powerful, almost magnetic, pulling him back up to the heights of ecstasy. Oh, to be born and die and be reborn over and over again. It was the experience of the century—and, for a moment or two, a victory for the chemist in his laboratory that he could not help broadcasting to the rest of the world.
So much did Sertürner crave the morphine experience, and so much was he a product of his own century, that he demanded a faster way to get the drug into his bloodstream. After all, speed was one of the great side benefits of the Industrial Revolution—faster travel, faster communication, and faster consumption. Sertürner read the zeitgeist; he wanted the high, and he wanted it right now. (High comes out of nineteenth-century street slang, first used around 1880.) But he never got his desire. Injecting drugs was not really possible until fifty years after Sertürner discovered morphine, when, in 1853, a Scottish doctor named Alexander Wood invented a crude hypodermic syringe, making it fairly simple for anyone to inject morphine directly into his or her own bloodstream.
By the time of the Civil War, American surgeons on both sides regularly dispensed morphine to soldiers on the battlefield. Farmers cultivated poppies in both Union and Confederate territories, with Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia as the major producers. One particularly well-liked Union surgeon, Major Nathan Mayer, who found giving injections much too cumbersome, poured generous amounts of morphine onto his gloved hands. Riding past the troops, he invited them, like so many puppies, to take a lick. It mattered not at all that morphine left the battlefield littered with addicts: Immediate pleasure trumped long-range pain. Could such a potent drug count as the secret of life? It could, indeed, but could not, it seems, hold on to its top position.
For chemistry did not pause at the pure morphine stage for long. So intense was the search for more and cheaper ways to get hold of the spark of life that, in 1874, a pharmacist in London, searching for a nonaddictive alternative to morphine, boiled a batch of it with acetic anhydride, producing a substance with immensely powerful narcotic properties. (Though he did not know it, he had produced something highly addictive once more.) By 1898, a worker at the Bayer company in Germany had noted the amazingly powerful properties of that solution as a painkiller and, again quite accidentally, a cough suppressant. The head of Bayer’s pharmacological laboratory, Heinrich Dreser, tried the drug and called the experience absolutely heroisch, “heroic.” Like De Quincey, he had been yanked up to heaven and dropped into hell. His laboratory assistant exclaimed, after injecting a dose of heroin, “I have kissed God!” Such a tremendous high, experience tells us, brings with it an equally horrific downer.
Beginning in November of 1898, Dreser marketed the new drug under the brand name Heroin. An anodyne of such heroic proportions, Dreser proclaimed, should go by no other name. By 1899 Bayer was producing over a ton of Heroin a year and exporting it to twenty-three countries. Nine years later, after learning of the terribly addictive qualities of his new product, Dreser tried to bolster Bayer’s reputation by marketing a much safer albeit less potent anodyne. Dreser succeeded in developing a pain reliever from natural ingredients, extracting from the willow plant the chemical salicin, which he marketed as a powder under the trade name Aspirin.
In West Germany, meanwhile, another German chemist, Friedrich Gaedcke, was working to isolate the alkaloid of the coca leaf. His experiments proved successful around 1855, at which point he coined the name cocaine. The word appears for the first time in English in 1874. Here was another very powerful and very popular anodyne that physicians came to use as an anesthetic, in this case around 1860. The Coca-Cola Company used the coca leaves in its drink, which it advertised—in an understated way—as having great medicinal properties.
In 1884, Freud wrote a famous research paper on how the drug affected levels of awareness, entitled, simply, “Über Coca” (“About Cocaine”). In the essay, Freud talked of “the most gorgeous excitement of ingesting the drug,” and goes on to sound out a testimonial for the drug’s “exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which in no way differs from the normal euphoria of the healthy person . . . You receive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work . . . In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe you are under the influence of any drug.” Freud recommended cocaine to cure morphine addiction and used it himself as an anodyne for about two years. Both of the drug’s manufacturers, Merck and Parke-Davis, paid Freud to endorse their rival brands. Freud was a believer, and his use of the drug, some people believe, led directly to his work on dreams.
In that annus mirabilis, 1800, Sir Humphry Davy, a chemist, poet, and pioneer in electricity, came to the laboratory of a friend, Thomas Beddoes, in Bristol, England, called the Pneumatic Institute, to assume the role of supervisor. At his laboratory, Beddoes dedicated himself to exploring the healing effects on sick patients of inhaling various gases. The Pneumatic Institute was a popular place; the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge frequented it to take what they called “the airs,” not for any particular illness, but for feelings of general well-being. In 1772, the English chemist Joseph Priestley had discovered an odorless, colorless gas that produced an insensitivity to pain. While working at the Institute, Davy purified that chemical compound and named it nitrous oxid
e. After his first inhalation, he quickly lauded its astonishing property of inducing feelings of euphoria.
Completely taken with his discovery, Davy immediately announced to his colleagues that he had stumbled upon the true philosopher’s stone. He dazzled various assemblies of friends by inhaling his odorless gas and then sticking pins and needles into his body without any noticeable pain, giggling like a child through the entire experience. That proved, he declared, that he could control life, for he had located the seat of all feeling and sensation. Even the esteemed psychologist William James devoted an entire essay, which he published in the journal Mind in 1882, to the “fleeting brilliance of nitrous oxide inhalation.” Titled “The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide,” James’s article extols the virtues of finding insight by inhaling the gas: “With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination.”
Robert Southey, one of the wilder poets of the period, on one of his trips to Beddoes’s laboratory, tried the odorless gas and praised it as the highest order of religious experience: “I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder working gas of delight.”6 That was enough for Davy to keep his research alive on what came to be called in the period the famous “factitious air.” With James Watt, another wizard of the invisible—the inventor of the steam engine—Davy built a nitrous oxide chamber, in which people could absorb the wondrous gas through all the pores of their body. After one such session in his own chamber, Davy wrote the following paean to the power of the invisible, in his diary: “Nothing exists but thoughts. The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pain.” Another session in the chamber prompted the following poem from Davy: “Yet are my eyes with sparkling luster fill’d/Yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound/Yet are my limbs with inward transports fill’d/And clad with new-born mightiness around.”7
In England, nitrous oxide became a popular plaything. One of the features of traveling carnivals through the countryside of England was something called “nitrous oxide capers,” where for a few pence people could enter a tent, inhale the wonder gas, and giggle their hearts out. They staggered so dizzily that they, themselves, became part of the amusement. Inhaling intoxicants became a staple of British life. Traveling mountebanks, calling themselves professors, would extol the virtues of, say, nitrous oxide or ether, and then invite audience members to step forward and breathe deeply.
A group of amateur scientists, who called themselves the Askesian Society, fueled their curiosity with group inhalations of nitrous oxide. After serving some time with the Society, a young member named Luke Howard gave a lecture to the group, in 1802, on the most evanescent thing imaginable, clouds—one vapor seeming to be as good as any other. He had done something, he said, that no one else had ever done—a taxonomy of clouds. The names he chose—cirrus, stratus, cumulus, and nimbus—meteorologists still use today. Believing that nitrous oxide had provided him with his revelation about the new science he had launched, meteorology, Howard came back to the gas so many times he became addicted.
No intellectual groups formed around nitrous oxide in America, but nonetheless it had a following in this country, too. By the 1820s, students at Yale used laughing gas regularly at their weekend parties to break from their studies. Different from England, someone in America found out quickly how to make money off the giggling gas. A Hartford, Connecticut, dentist, Horace Wells, witnessed a volunteer inhale nitrous oxide in 1844, while someone else cut a long gash into the man’s leg; the man looked down at his wound, wondered aloud about the long red line running down his thigh, and began laughing uncontrollably. The next day, Wells had a fellow dentist administer the “laughing gas” to him and extracted one of his teeth. Wells later commented: “It is the greatest discovery ever made. I didn’t feel as much as the prick of a pin.”8 And so nitrous oxide gave birth to a new profession in America: painless dentistry.
Davy, meanwhile, turned his discovery to more serious medical uses, most notably to surgery: “As nitrous oxide, in its extensive operation, seems capable of destroying physical pain, it may profitably be used with advantage in surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place.”9 While he made that statement in 1800, it took almost half a century more, all the way to 1844, for hospital officials to allow his laughing gas into the operating room in the form of anesthesia. The word first enters the English language (from Latin by way of Greek) in 1721, to describe those who, because of some major paralysis or other disabling injury, experience “a defect of sensation.” In November 1846, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested that the state created by nitrous oxide be named anesthesia, from Greek an, “without,” and aesthesia, “sensibility.” Just two years later, in 1848, anesthesia had already entered common parlance as a loss of all sensation induced by some chemical agent, which, at this early stage in its development, lasted for no more than two or three minutes.
Davy believed that anesthetized patients lay in a state of hibernation, lingering at the border separating life and death. The age had thus to confront this new creature, a breathing human frame that had been intentionally stripped of all feeling. It would do so over and over, in many permutations. Would anyone still call that seemingly inert lump of flesh on the operating table a human being? A truly sensate human being? Did that thing actually “have” a body? Or, more to the point, did it “have” a life? Though the patient felt no pain, he or she or it certainly seemed to lack consciousness. Or, on the other hand, was the patient pure consciousness, the state that everyone so vigorously pursued but that no one could ever name?
Michael Faraday, a chemist and physicist, towered over the Industrial Revolution as one of its chief inventors, producing an electric motor, dry-cell batteries, and a machine that powered a good deal of the revolution: a device he called a dynamo, a word from the Greek meaning “power and force.” He began conducting laboratory experiments at the Royal Institution in London in 1808, transforming liquids and then reversing the action, a process he called phase changes. In 1818, Faraday, a decade into his intense experiments, concocted an odorless gas that, he claimed, could produce much longer-lasting anesthetic effects than nitrous oxide.
Because of the potency of the new gas, Faraday claimed that he, and he alone, had tapped deeply into the secret compartments of life. So assured was he that he even named his discovery after the element that only the gods had the privilege of breathing—the quintessential or fifth element: the ethereal, or simply ether. With his new success in the laboratory, Faraday bragged, all human beings could now breathe deeply of the very same stuff as the gods; but the question remained, could they feel godlike? Crawford Long, a young doctor in Jefferson, Georgia, threw a series of wild parties where he dispensed ether to his guests, which he called his “ether frolics.” A protégé of the dentist Horace Wells, named William Thomas Green Morton, administered ether to a patient at Massachusetts General Hospital on October 16, 1846. While the Boston Medical Association marked the success of Morton’s operation by naming October 16 Ether Day, the first successful operation using ether as an anesthetic did not take place in England until a year later, in 1847.
BUT SOME OTHER chemist or physicist always lurked in the wings, just waiting to announce the next potion that would throw that all-important switch, releasing the subject from pain and moving him or her into a fully altered state. Thus, in November of 1847, Sir James Simpson, a noted chemist, announced the anesthetic properties of yet another new substance, trichloromethane, that Simpson insisted would place patients in a much less troubled slumber than all the other chemicals combined. He shortened the technical name to chloroform. (A Frenchman named Jean Dumas had compounded the greenish liquid—chloro—in 1834.)
Linda Stratmann, in her book on the history of chloroform, aptly titled Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion, points out that never had anyone devoted so much attention to the quest of deposing consciousness. These experiments, for lots of p
eople, carried real dangers. She says:Sleep was believed to be a halfway house between consciousness and death, during which the brain, apart from maintaining basic functions, was inactive. The higher functions of the brain, the essence of what made an individual human, were therefore locked in the state of consciousness, and to remove, or suspend, these functions was to reduce man to little more than an animal. The creation of artificial unconsciousness therefore raised the specters of madness and idiocy. It was not only life, reason and intellect that were at risk, for the search was still in progress for the physical seat of the human soul, which might be in some part of the nervous system as yet not fully understood.
And then we have to think about the testimony of an expert, a doctor named James Parke, of Liverpool, who wrote his colleagues these words of warning in 1847: “I contend that we violate the boundaries of a most noble profession when, in our capacity as medical men, we urge or seduce our fellow creatures for the sake of avoiding pain alone—pain unconnected with danger—to pass into a state of existence the secrets of which we know so little at present.” Parke believed the very profession itself was at stake, and he saw the field of medicine headed in the wrong direction. He may have been right, for medicine did begin to focus on two things after mid-century: the cessation of pain, and the prolongation of life.
Such warnings did not, however, go totally unheeded. Parke and others like him prompted a cadre of professionals who believed that they could explore the foundations of life much better and more efficiently, without the use of any chemicals or gases. The list includes mind readers, a great number of spiritualists, ghost talkers, experts on a new phenomenon called paramnesia or déjà vu, showmen, and even some scientists. James Braid, a highly respected Manchester surgeon, embodied all of those categories, along with a fairly large helping of daring and self-promotion. In 1841, reacting to the idea of anything so artificial as chloroform, Braid lectured about a much more powerful and organic fluid that coursed through the limbs of every man, woman, and child, uncovered earlier by the psychologist G. H. Schubert. Braid called this fluid “animal magnetism,” and it did not just hold the key to the secret of life, he told audience after audience; it was life itself. A trained practitioner, Braid advised, could reinvigorate the élan vital in a sickly person, even in someone near death, and, like Paracelsus himself, miraculously return the person to a healthy and robust life. Or, that same practitioner could move a person to a state where feeling totally disappeared, allowing a physician to perform the most complicated operations on the subject using as an anesthetic only Braid’s method.
Unsuspecting Souls Page 6