22 The seven-day-a-week job: Silver, “Surgery in Bellevue,” pp. 551–57.
23 In later life Halsted noted: For evidence of his activities, it is worthwhile reviewing Halsted’s surgical cases, which were recorded in a bound ledger entitled “Bellevue Hospital History Book for the Winter of 1877–1878” and can be found at the Ehrman Medical Library, New York University. There we find intricate descriptions written in what A. E. Dumont described as “a stylized Spencerian script by short-term prisoners who served as clerks and transcribed, verbatim, information contained on the hospital chart.” Many of these pages describe how Halsted and his colleagues treated patients with traumatic fractures, burns, abscesses, congenital malformations, and strangulated hernias. Among these meticulously kept case ledgers are copious descriptions of the use of chloroform and ether as surgical anesthetics. We also find evidence that many Bellevue surgeons still doubted the existence of disease-causing microbes and the role they played in thwarting surgical procedures. Indeed, the teachings of Joseph Lister, the Scottish surgeon who insisted on conducting surgical explorations only after dousing his hands and the wound with powerful antiseptic chemicals, were only sporadically practiced in the vast operating theaters of Bellevue. See Allan E. Dumont, “Halsted at Bellevue, 1883–1887,” Annals of Surgery 172, no. 6 (1970): 929–35. (Dumont describes the record book for 1883–87, but the volume for 1877–78, as well as several others during that era, were similarly dictated to and transcribed by recuperating prisoners facile with an ink pen.) See also Olch, “New York Period,” pp. 495–510; Carlisle, An Account of Bellevue; MacCallum, Halsted, pp. 39–57; S. Smith, “Reminiscences of Two Epochs—Anesthesia and Asepsis,” Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 30 (1919): 273–78; and Gert H. Brieger, “American Surgery and the Germ Theory of Disease,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 40 (1966): 135–45.
24 There he briefly flirted: James J. Walsh, History of Medicine in New York, vol. 1 (New York: National Americana Society, 1919), pp. 224–25; and MacCallum, Halsted, pp. 19–20. Halsted and his roommate Thomas McBride even invited Seguin to live with them after the suicide of the neurologist’s wife.
25 Between 1870 and 1914: Thomas N. Bonner, American Doctors and German Universities: A Chapter in International Intellectual Relations, 1870–1914 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 23–68.
26 Every evening, he washed down: Bonner, American Doctors; see also Thomas N. Bonner, Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Charles D. O’Malley, ed., The History of Medical Education (Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles, 1970).
27 Each morning, Professor Meynert: Halsted to Welch, July 14, 1922, W. H. Welch Papers, Series II, Notes, Box 31, Alan Mason Chesney Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore; and MacCallum, Halsted, p. 22.
28 As his Johns Hopkins colleague William Osler: Bonner, American Doctors, pp. 99–101; and William Osler, “The Inner History of the Johns Hopkins Hospital,” ed. D. G. Bates and E. H. Bensley, Johns Hopkins Medical Journal 125 (1969): 184–94.
Chapter 3. Über Coca
1 Along the way,: Margaret Haney, “Neurobiology of Stimulants,” in The American Psychiatry Publishing Textbook of Substance Abuse Treatment, ed. Marc Galanter and Herbert D. Kleber, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatry Press, 2008), pp. 143–55; and D. A. Gorelick, “The Pharmacology of Cocaine, Amphetamines and Other Stimulants,” in Principles of Addiction Medicine, ed. R. A. Ries, D. A. Fiellen, S. C. Miller, and R. Saitz, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer / Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2009), pp. 133–57.
2 So cherished a staple: Sigmund Freud, Cocaine Papers, ed. Robert Byck (New York: Stonehill, 1974); William Golden Mortimer, Peru: History of Coca; “The Divine Plant” of the Incas (New York: J. H. Vail and Co., 1901); and George Andrews and David Solomon, eds., The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers (New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, 1975). The story of cocaine—and its use by Peruvian Indians and its so-called discovery by Europeans—is, of course, far more complex and nonhegemonic; for an analysis of this global history, see Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Cocaine: Global Histories, Paul Gootenberg, ed. (London: Routledge, 1999); Dominic Streatfeild, Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Picador, 2001); and Curtis Marez, “The Coquero in Freud: Psychoanalysis, Race, and the International Economics of Distinction,” Cultural Critique 26 (Winter 1993–94): 65–93.
3 Manco Cápac’s other gift: Quote is from Sigmund Freud, Über Coca, in Freud, Cocaine Papers, p. 50; see also Mortimer, History of Coca, pp. 28–54.
4 They brought with them: Guenter B. Risse, “Medicine in New Spain,” in Medicine in the New World: New Spain, New France, and New England, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), pp. 12–63; and William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor Books, 1977).
5 The Spanish conquerors of Peru: Mortimer, History of Coca, pp. 265–89.
6 “I shall collect”: Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, abridged ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996), p. ix.
7 The two men forged ahead: Kirkpatrick Sale, Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise (New York: Longitude Books, 1990).
8 He was impressed: Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804, 2nd ed., trans. Helen Mona Williams (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), p. 648.
9 Parenthetically, Humboldt erroneously hypothesized: The traditional chewing of the coca leaf with llipta, most commonly the ash of a quinoa plant, tones down its rather bitter taste and activates the alkaloids in the leaf, which contain coca’s active ingredient. Eleanor Carroll, “Coca: The Plant and Its Use,” in Cocaine: 1977, ed. Robert C. Petersen and Richard C. Stillman, NIDA Research Monographs 13 (Rockville, Md.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1977), pp. 35–44.
10 Before long Humboldt’s fascination: Mortimer, History of Coca, pp. 168–71.
11 “[The Indians] masticate”: Quoted in Mortimer, History of Coca, p. 169. See also Gentleman’s Magazine, 1814, vol. 84, p. 217; and Streatfeild, Cocaine, pp. 50–51.
12 A few years later, he developed: “William Hickling Prescott,” in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 15, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), pp. 196–200; and Donald Darnell, “William Hickling Prescott,” in American National Biography, vol. 17, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 835–36.
13 He became a best-selling author: William H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic, of Spain (Boston: Richard Bentley, 1858).
14 From there, he turned to writing: “Prescott,” American Biography, vol. 15, pp. 196–200; “Prescott,” National Biography, vol. 17, pp. 835–36; and William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru (New York: Modern Library, 1936).
15 “Even food the most invigorating”: Prescott, History of the Conquest, p. 803.
16 “Yet, with the soothing charms”: Ibid.
17 During much of the 1850s: Mortimer, History of Coca, pp. 295, 299.
18 By the close of the nineteenth century: Ibid., pp. 294–98. Other sources of information that Niemann used in his studies were the work of a University of Pennsylvania chemist named John Maisch and that of the German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke.
19 “I sneered at all the poor mortals”: A translation of excerpts of this monograph appears as Paolo Mantegazza, “Coca Experiences,” in The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers, pp. 38–42; quote is from p. 41. This was a paper Freud read and incorporated into his monograph Über Coca.
20 “Each race has its fashions”: Angelo Mariani, Coca and Its Therapeutic Applica
tions, 2nd ed. (New York: J. N. Jaros, 1892), p. 5; see also Angelo Mariani, Coca erythroxylon: Its Uses in the Treatment of Disease with Notes and Comments by Prominent Physicians, 4th ed. (Paris: Mariani and Co., 1886). Two intriguing yet marginal notes emerge from this essay. The first is Mariani’s claim that South Americans chewed coca leaves in their sleep, which runs counterintuitive to its regard as a stimulant. Second is Mariani’s reference to a “certain therapeutist,” who was, as it turned out, Sigmund Freud’s former professor Hermann Nothnagel. Dr. Nothnagel publicly declared cocaine to be worthless in Hermann Nothnagel and M. J. Rossbach, A Treatise on Materia Medica, Including Therapeutics and Toxicology, trans. H. N. Heinemann (New York: Bermingham’s Medical Library, 1883–84); originally published as Handbuch der Arzneimittellehre (Berlin: A. Hirschwald, 1878).
21 In the decades that followed: Cocaethylene has the same affinity for dopamine receptors as cocaine, but the time it holds on to these receptors greatly exceeds that of cocaine. This means that a combination of cocaine and alcohol can keep one inebriated longer than taking cocaine alone. Steven B. Karch, Karch’s Pathology of Drug Abuse (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2001), pp. 3–5.
22 Around the same time: Mortimer, History of Coca, p. 180; and A. LaLauze, ed., Portraits from Album Mariani (New York: Mariani and Company, 1893).
23 In the years to come: See, for example, Portraits from Album Mariani; and Streatfeild, Cocaine, pp. 59–61.
24 Such positive buzz: Mariani, Therapeutic Applications; see also Mariani, Coca erythroxylon.
25 That first year: To convert 1886 dollars into 2010 values, I used a formula based on the consumer price index from the economic history–focused website Measuring Worth, www.measuringworth.com/index.html (accessed February 25, 2010).
26 In 1887, he abruptly sold: The convoluted history of the ownership of Coca-Cola is nicely described in Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Streatfeild, Cocaine, pp. 80–82. Late-nineteenth-century dollars were converted into 2010 values using a formula based on the consumer price index from the economic history—focused website Measuring Worth, www.measuringworth.com/index.html (accessed February 25, 2010).
27 In 1892, Candler prevailed: The merchandising and use of all these coca products reached epidemic proportions until 1906, beginning with the U.S. Congress’s passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and, more definitively, with a series of municipal, state, and, ultimately, federal laws, such as the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, which introduced national drug prohibition. Specifically, the Harrison Act decreed that all dangerous drugs, including cocaine and morphine, be prescribed by physicians, dispensed by registered pharmacists, and taken by specific patients along with strict, accurate record keeping. After the passage of this law, any other type of cocaine or opiate sales became a federal crime. See Joseph E. Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 67–104; and Streatfeild, Cocaine, pp. 79–82, 155–56.
28 Such chemical developments: Fran Hawthorne, The Merck Druggernaut: The Inside Story of a Pharmaceutical Giant (New York: John Wiley, 2003); and Tom Mahoney, The Merchants of Life: An Account of the American Pharmaceutical Industry (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959).
29 But while they all became adept: David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 46–52.
30 In the decades before Henry Ford: Duffield left the firm in 1866, and the name Parke, Davis and Company was adopted in 1871. Weirdly, Hervey Parke’s middle name was Coke. The other major industries in Detroit during this era included timber and the manufacture of ships, cast-iron stoves, metal products, and railway cars. See Mahoney, Merchants of Life, pp. 69–73; Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Arthur Pound, Detroit: Dynamic City (New York: D. Appleton—Century Co., 1940); Stephen Meyer, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981); and Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).
31 Instrumental to Parke, Davis and Company’s attempt: Courtwright, Forces of Habit, p. 48.
32 Nearly half a century later: Henry Hurd Rusby, Jungle Memories (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), p. 3.
33 It was, as Rusby later described: Ibid.; Fifty Years of Manufacturing Pharmacy and Biology: Jubilee Souvenir, 1866–1916 (Detroit: Parke-Davis, n.d.), Collections of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; Parke-Davis, 1806–1966: A Backward Glance (Detroit: Parke-Davis, 1966), Collections of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan; and Mahoney, Merchants of Life. For an extensive reprinting of most of the cocaine papers published in the Therapeutic Gazette during this period, see Freud, Cocaine Papers; a complete set of the Therapeutic Gazette (or, as it has often been referred to, the Detroit Therapeutic Gazette) has been preserved and stored in the University of Michigan Libraries, Ann Arbor. A subsequent blockbuster drug developed by Parke, Davis was adrenaline, or epinephrine, which was discovered by the great Johns Hopkins pharmacologist John Jacob Abel.
34 With such ready access: Jill Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 11–58; and Courtwright, Forces of Habit, pp. 31–52.
35 During the early 1880s: Marez, “The Coquero in Freud,” pp. 65–93. Marez notes that during the first six months of 1885, the elite British Medical Journal featured more than sixty-seven separate articles about cocaine. See, for example, Robert Christison, “The Effects of Cuca or Coca, the Leaves of Erythroxylon coca,” British Medical Journal 1 (1876): 527–31; see also Atherton P. Mason, “Erythroxylon coca: Its Physiological Effect, and Especially Its Effect on the Excretion of Urea by the Kidney,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 107 (1882): 221–23.
36 Indeed, this now forgotten and crumbling periodical: A bibliography of these Therapeutic Gazette articles, as well as reprints of many of them, can be found in Freud, Cocaine Papers.
37 For a brief period: Mahoney, Merchants of Life, pp. 69–73. The other, and perhaps more important, index of the medical literature of this era was the Index-Catalogue of the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, a publication of the United States Government. Freud himself noted that the Index-Catalogue was the first major index source he consulted when he began his study of cocaine.
Chapter 4. An Addict’s Death
1 They were inscribed: Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, 1856–1900 (New York: Basic Books, 1953), pp. 66–68; the aphorisms are quoted on p. 66, and a diagram of the chamber appears on p. 67. The actual letter is in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
2 Sigmund, who hardly needed any incentive: Freud worked on Scholz’s nervous disease service for fourteen months, but the two never really got along and the senior physician wanted Freud transferred to another service some six months before his term was up. Freud then went on to complete a three-month stint in the ophthalmology department and applied for another three-month rotation in dermatology. He was spared this last task when he received permission to spend those last three months as a locum tenens physician for 100 gulden a month, plus room and board, in Heinrich Obersteiner’s private neurology clinic just outside Vienna; Jones, Life, vol. 1, pp. 73–74.
3 Instead, his main inspiration: Ibid., pp. 78–97; E. M. Thornton, Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy (London: Blond and Briggs, 1983), pp. 36–47; and Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 44. See also Robert C. Fuller, “Biographical Origins of Psychological Ideas: Freud’s Cocaine Studies,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 32 (1
992): 67–86; Richard Karmel, “Freud’s Cocaine Papers (1884–1887): A Commentary,” Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis 11 (2003): 161–69; Siegfried Bernfeld, “Freud’s Studies on Cocaine, 1884–1887,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 1 (1953): 581–613; George Andrews and David Solomon, eds., The Coca Leaf and Cocaine Papers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975); and Sigmund Freud, Cocaine Papers, ed. Robert Byck (New York: Stonehill, 1974).
4 Despite a series of operations: Jones, Life, vol. 1, pp. 89–92.
5 “an unending torture”: Ibid., p. 44
6 “I could not rest”: Ibid., p. 89.
7 “Cunning, baffling, and powerful”: Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism, 4th ed. (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001), pp. 58–59.
8 His was an addiction: Some might argue that while Fleischl-Marxow was physically dependent on morphine, he might not be diagnosed today with DSM-IV criteria for true addiction; instead, he might be considered to suffer from the poorly named “pseudoaddiction,” which suggests that the treatment of severe pain can yield many aberrant drug-taking behaviors that look like addiction but often disappear if the source of pain is adequately treated with other agents. I am grateful to my colleague Professor Kirk Brower, medical director of the University of Michigan Addiction Treatment Service, for pointing out this distinction to me.
9 Most of these medical doctors: The well-known mild pain reliever aspirin merits mention. Willow bark, rich in salicin, the active ingredient of aspirin, had been prescribed since the days of Hippocrates, but aspirin was not mass-produced and marketed until 1899, by the Bayer Company of Germany. As superb a medication as it is for mild pain and headaches, however, aspirin is not effective against more severe forms of pain, such as that experienced by Fleischl-Marxow. See Diarmuid Jeffreys, Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).
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