10 During the mid-1800s: Barbara Hodgson, In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine, and Patent Medicines (Buffalo, N.Y.: Firefly Books, 2001), pp. 14–15, 79–101; Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York: Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 1–34; W. Travis Hanes and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2002); and Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).
11 “If the whole materia medica”: Oliver W. Holmes Sr., “Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science,” in Medical Essays (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), pp. 202–03. Materia medica, a term that dates back to the era of the Roman Empire and was still in use at the opening of the twentieth century, referred to the body of knowledge on various therapeutics used for healing purposes. It has since been replaced by the modern scientific field of pharmacology.
12 A German pharmacist: Hodgson, Arms of Morpheus, p. 79.
13 Morphine’s popularity and profitability: Eric C. Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Heroin was first extracted in 1874 by a London pharmacist in search of a nonaddictive alternative to morphine. By boiling morphine with acetic anhydride he produced a powerful narcotic, twice as potent as a dose of morphine, which the Bayer Company began to market as heroin in 1898.
14 Especially in the decades after the development: G. Lawrence, “The Hypodermic Syringe,” Lancet 359, no. 9311 (March 23, 2002): 1074; George L. Servoss, The Hypodermic Syringe (Newark, N.J.: Physicians Drug News, Publishers, 1914); and Roberts Bartholow, Manual of Hypodermic Medication: The Treatment of Diseases by the Hypodermic Method, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1882).
15 In O’Neill’s play: Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). See also Barbara Gelb and Arthur Gelb, O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo (New York: Applause Books, 2000); and Hamilton Basso, “Profiles: The Tragic Sense,” New Yorker, February 28, 1948, pp. 34–45; parts 2 and 3 of this article appear in the March 6, 1948, issue, pp. 34–49, and the March 13, 1948, issue, pp. 37–47. See also David T. Courtright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Richard Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Jill Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Caroline J. Acker, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and Booth, Opium: A History.
16 Interestingly, morphine addicts: Courtright, Dark Paradise, pp. 35–60; and Hodgson, Arms of Morpheus, pp. 14–15, 79–101.
17 As the late comedian: Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, film documentary, 1998 (produced, written, and directed by Robert B. Weide; edited by Geof Bartz and Robert B. Weide; released by Whyaduck Productions in association with HBO Documentary Films, 1998); P. Krassner, “The Busting of Lenny,” Index on Censorship 6 (2000): 78–85; and Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!! (New York: Random House, 1974).
18 Ramped-up versions: Mary Jeanne Kreek, “Neurobiology of Opiates and Opioids,” in The American Psychiatry Publishing Textbook of Substance Abuse Treatment, 4th ed., ed. Marc Galanter and Herbert D. Kleber (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatry Press, 2008), pp. 247–64; Soteri Polydorou and Herbert D. Kleber, “Detoxification of Opiates and Opioids,” in Textbook of Substance Abuse Treatment, pp. 265–87; L. Borg, I. Kravets, and M. J. Kreek, “The Pharmacology of Long-Acting as Opposed to Short-Acting Opioids,” in Principles of Addiction Medicine, 4th ed., ed. R. A. Ries, D. A. Fiellen, S. C. Miller, and R. Saitz (Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2009), pp. 117–31; Robert M. Julien, A Primer of Drug Action: A Concise, Nontechnical Guide to the Actions, Uses, and Side Effects of Psychoactive Drugs (New York: Holt/Owl Books, 2001), pp. 173–81; and S. M. Stine and T. R. Kosten, “Opioids,” in Addictions: A Comprehensive Guidebook, ed. Barbara S. McCrady and Elizabeth E. Epstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 141–61.
19 “I am also toying”: Sigmund Freud to Martha Bernays, April 21, 1884, Ernst L. Freud, ed., Letters of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), pp. 107–09 (Letter 43); quote is from p. 107.
20 Elsewhere in this letter: Freud notes in his monograph Über Coca that his first source of material was the section on Erythroxylon coca in the Index Catalogue of the Library of the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office, vol. 4, 1883, which he considered to be the most complete index of the literature up to that time.
21 For example, he refers: Freud, Über Coca, in Freud, Cocaine Papers, p. 73; see also a paper Freud read and referenced by the Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza, “Sulle virtù igieniche e medicinali della coca,” Memoria Annali Universali di Medicina, 1859, cited by Byck in Cocaine Papers. An English translation of parts of this paper appears in Andrews and Solomon, The Coca Leaf, pp. 38–42.
22 He also describes: T. Aschenbrandt, “Die Physiologische Wirkung und Bedeutung des Cocain insbesondere auf den menschlichen Organismus,” Deutche medizinische Wochenschrift, no. 50 (December 12, 1883): 730–32.
23 Two years later: W. H. Bentley, “Erythoxylon coca in the Opium and Alcohol Habits,” Therapeutic Gazette 1 (1880): 253, reprinted in Freud, Cocaine Papers, pp. 14–19.
24 Substituting one addictive drug: Andrews and Solomon, The Coca Leaf; Freud, Cocaine Papers; and Thornton, Freud and Cocaine. Today, addiction physicians routinely prescribe the less severely but nonetheless addictive drug methadone for opiate addicts, with great success; the difference is that with this modern substitution the medical repercussions are significantly less than when trading cocaine for morphine. A newer agent, buprenorphine, blocks opiate receptors and, thus, the high one might get upon taking a subsequent dose of heroin or morphine, but this drug, too, can be manipulated by active addicts in an abusive manner.
25 At the dawn of doctors’ recognition: Asa P. Maylert, Notes on the Opium Habit, 3rd ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885); and J. P. Gavit, Opium (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1925).
26 The great microbiologist Louis Pasteur: Louis Pasteur, “Inaugural Lecture, University of Lille, December 4, 1854,” quoted in John Bartlett, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, ed. Justin Kaplan, 16th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992), p. 502.
27 Like Moses: Freud’s final book, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), was first published in 1939.
28 Writing about the conversation: Freud to Martha, May 29, 1884, Freud, Letters, pp. 109–12 (Letter 44).
29 On the nights he sat: Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 91.
30 “I admire and love him”: Ibid., p. 90.
31 Fleischl-Marxow eagerly consented: Siegfried Bernfeld, “Freud’s Studies on Cocaine, 1884–1887,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 1 (1953): 581–613.
32 The four men eventually procured: Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 90.
33 In the time span of less than three months: 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).
34 This does not even account: Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 91.
35 Freud recalled it: Ibid.
36 A guilt-ridden Sigmund: Ibid., pp. 80–81, 89–96.
37 In the days immediately following: George M. Beard, “Neurasthenia or Nervous Exhaustion,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 80 (1869): 217–21; George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences; A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881); H. A. Bunker, “From Beard to Freud: A Brief History of the Concept of Neurasthenia,” Medical Review of Reviews 36 (1930): 108–14; Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Place of George
Miller Beard in American Psychiatry,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36 (1962): 245–59; and Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), pp. 129–130. Beard defined this entity as a bridge of sorts between organic causes and symptoms that affected one’s mood, thinking, and feelings. It was marked by fatigue and exhaustion, depression, headaches, dyspepsia, insomnia, paralysis, neuralgia, and a number of other symptoms. The diagnosis fell out of favor beginning in the early twentieth century.
38 In one 1884 publication: The original version of this paper was published in the November 1884 issue of Klinische Monatsblatter fur Augenheilkunde, Zeherder and appeared a few months later as E. Merck, “Cocaine and Its Salts,” trans. W. M. Smith, Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner 50 (February 1885): 157–63. The Latin prescription in Merck’s disclaimer is “Muriatic solution of Cocaine, Merck.”
39 Budgeting 33 kreuzer: Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 80; 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).
40 His bad mood: Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 80.
41 Like many inquiring doctors: For a fascinating account of self-experimentation in medicine, see Lawrence K. Altman, Who Goes First: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine (New York: Random House, 1987).
42 In May 1884: Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 81.
43 “If all goes well”: Ibid.
44 “Woe to you”: Freud to Martha, June 2, 1884, quoted at length ibid., p. 84.
45 And as his use of cocaine progressed: Jones, Life, vol. 1, 84. See also Freud to Martha, June 29, 1884, Freud, Letters, pp. 115–16 (Letter 47); pp. 145–46 (Letter 65); and pp. 200–204 (Letter 94). For example, a packet Sigmund sent in June 1885 included a vial containing a gram of cocaine with instructions to divide the drug into “8 small (or 5 large) doses” for her mental indisposition. See Gay, Freud, p. 44.
46 Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones: Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 82.
47 He now begins: Freud, “On Coca,” in Freud, Cocaine Papers, p. 58.
48 “A few minutes after”: Ibid.
49 In essence, Über Coca introduces: Ibid. In a subsequent paper published in 1885, Sigmund writes a specific disclaimer that he is aware of the problems of objectivity when doing such self-experiments; Freud, “Contribution to the Knowledge of the Effect of Cocaine (1885),” in Freud, Cocaine Papers, pp. 98–99.
50 By midsummer, Freud saw: Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 93; Sigmund Freud, “Über Coca,” Centralblatt für die gesammte Therapie 2 (1885): 289–314. 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). 85 As early as the second century A.D.: Howard Markel, “Who’s on First? Medical Discoveries and Scientific Priority,” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (2004): 2792–94; and Galen, On the Natural Faculties, trans. A. J. Brock, book 3, sec. 10 (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb’s Classical Library, 1916), pp. 279–81.
51 Carl, incidentally: Freud to Martha, January 6, 1885, Freud, Letters, pp. 131–32 (Letter 55); quote is from p. 131.
52 “By this time”: Hortense Koller Becker, “Carl Koller and Cocaine,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 32 (1963): 309–73; Arthur J. Beckhard and William D. Crane, Cancer, Cocaine and Courage: The Story of Dr. William Halsted (New York: Julian Messner, 1960), pp. 119–21; Carl Koller, “On the Use of Cocaine for Producing Anesthesia of the Eye,” trans. J. N. Bloom, Lancet, December 6, 1884; and Carl Koller, “Historical Notes on the Beginnings of Local Anesthesia,” Journal of the American Medical Association 90, no. 21 (1928): 1742–43.
53 In late 1884: Sigmund Freud, “Contribution to the Knowledge of the Effect of Cocaine,” Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift, no. 5 (January 31, 1885): 130–33, in Freud, Cocaine Papers, pp. 95–104. See also Sigmund Freud, “Addenda to Über Coca,” a revised and expanded reprint from the Centralblatt fur die gesammte Therapie, Vienna, 1885, in Freud, Cocaine Papers, pp. 107–09.
54 Freud also claimed: Leopold Königstein conducted some work on cocaine and the eye and later, at Freud’s instigation, inserted a letter in Wiener medizinische Presse, nos. 42 and 43, asserting Freud’s primacy as discoverer of cocaine. Freud, “Beitrag zur Kenntniss,” in Freud, Cocaine Papers, pp. 95–104. See also L. Königstein, “Über die Anwendung des Cocain am Auge,” Centralbaltt für die gesammte Therapie (Vienna: Verlag von Mortiz Perles, 1885). Quoted in Jones, Life, vol. 1, p. 87.
55 It was an attractive: To make matters more contentious, when Koller published the paper he read to the Vienna Medical Society, he cited Freud’s paper as being published in August rather than July. The implication of such erroneous dating, in Freud’s view, was to suggest that Koller’s work was done before or simultaneously with Freud’s rather than after it. In later life, Koller asserted that Freud’s work appeared a full year after his own paper. C. Koller, “Nachträgliche Bemerkungen über die ersten Anfäng der Lokalanaesthesie,” Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift, 1935, p. 7. See also Jones, Life, vol. 1, pp. 87–88; and Gay, Freud, p. 43.
56 Another barometer of Freud’s feelings: Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (Vienna: Deuticke, 1905); published in the United States as Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002).
57 To Martha, in January 1885: Freud to Martha, January 7, 1885, Freud, Letters, pp. 132–33 (Letter 56); and Gay, Freud, pp. 44–45. See also Jones, Life, vol. 1, pp. 96–97.
58 Later, Freud was said to have inscribed: Becker, “Carl Koller and Cocaine.”
59 In 1895, Sigmund reported a dream: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 255–56, 259, 262, 309, 387; and Gay, Freud, p. 43.
60 “I may here go back a little”: Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, rpt. ed., 1989), p. 13.
61 As he read the passage: Fritz Wittels, Sigmund Freud and His Time (New York: Liveright, 1931), p. 19. The Freud annotated copy can be found in the Freud Museum and Archives, London; quoted in Gay, Freud, p. 45.
62 “I know very well”: Jones, Life, vol. 1, pp. 83–84; the quote is from a letter from Freud to Wittels, December 12, 1923, cited in Jones. “Allotrion” is a word Sigmund and his teachers used during his schooldays.
Chapter 5. The Accidental Addict
1 At the system’s official opening: A. F. Harlow, “Telegraph,” in Dictionary of American History, vol. 5, ed. J. T. Adams and R. V. Coleman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), p. 238; and Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), pp. 153–89.
2 The primary focus: Carl Koller, “Über die verwendung des cocain zur Anasthesierung am Auge,” Wiener medizische Wochenschrift 34, nos. 43 and 44 (1884); and Carl Koller, “Vorlaufige Mitteilung über Lokale Anestheiserung am Auge,” manuscript of a speech delivered for Dr. Koller by Dr. Josef Brettauer at the meeting of the German Ophthalmological Society at Heidelberg, September 15, 1884. Also in the room was Dr. Henry Noyes, of New York City, who immediately wrote a dispatch of this talk for the New York Medical Record, “The Ophthalmological Congress in Heidelberg,” New York Medical Record 26 (October 11, 1884): 417–18. It was likely this paper that introduced Halsted to cocaine. In this dispatch, Noyes stated that “the momentous value of the discovery seems likely to be in eye practice of more significance than has been the discovery of anesthesia by chloroform or ether in general surgery and medicine.”
3 The scientific details: Koller’s discovery was briefly reported in the major New York newspapers around this time as well. See, for example, “A Costly Anesthetic,” New York Times, October 23, 1884, p. 8; and “The New Anesthetic: Int
eresting Experiments with the Discovery in Albany,” New York Times, October 29, 1884, p. 2. Both of these articles refer to experiments with cocaine already being done in New York after Koller’s announcement.
4 The price of cocaine: “The New Anaesthetic: Interesting Experiments with the Discovery in Albany,” New York Times, October 29, 1884, p. 2; 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).
5 The 1846 discovery: To be sure, surgical advancement also required an understanding of the concept of surgical shock, intravenous fluids and blood transfusions, and a number of twentieth-century innovations that facilitated more and more invasive surgery, but it was the “discovery” of anesthesia that set this process in motion. See Sherwin B. Nuland, The Origins of Anesthesia (Birmingham, Ala.: Classics of Medicine Library, 1983); Howard Markel, “Not So Great Moments: The ‘Discovery’ of Ether Anesthesia and Its ‘Re-discovery’ by Hollywood,” Journal of the American Medical Association 300 (2008): 2188–90; R. Fulop-Miller, Triumph over Pain, trans. E. Paul and C. Paul (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1938); Jurgen Thorwald, The Century of the Surgeon (New York: Bantam Books, rpt. ed., 1963); and Martin S. Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism and Anesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
6 Although practiced since the days of antiquity: Mirko Grmek, Diseases in the Ancient World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 14; H. E. Sigerist, A History of Medicine, vol. 1, Primitive and Archaic Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 334.
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