In the winter of 1886, William Alexander Hammond – a famed neurologist and the former Surgeon General of the United States Army – took an enormous amount of cocaine. A reporter from the New York paper The Sun who interviewed him waggishly observed that the doctor had been ‘on a terrific spree for science’. Hammond had experimentally worked his way through as many different ways of taking the drug in as many different quantities as he could devise: he tried fluid extracts of coca (the plant from which pure cocaine is extracted), mixed grains of cocaine hydrochloride into purified wines, and eventually began injecting the drug hypodermically. The injections, he said, gave him ‘a delightful, undulating thrill’. On cocaine, everything felt ‘refined’ and ‘softened’. Hammond became intensely talkative: when he was alone, he would talk to himself at great length. ‘I became,’ he said, ‘rather sentimental and said nice things to everybody. The world was going very well, and I had a favourable opinion of my fellow men and women … I enjoyed myself hugely.’
William Alexander Hammond, c1860-65. Courtesy the Library of Congress
Hammond went on taking the drug in increasing amounts until ‘the sensations became rather painful than agreeable.’ He eventually pushed his tests as high as 18 grains (just over 1 gram) in a single dose, which caused him to become ‘oblivious’ to his own actions. He woke up in bed the next day with no memory of how he got there, and quickly discovered that he had, at some point in the night, decided to thoroughly wreck his own library. After this (and after recovering from a ‘most preposterous headache that lasted two days’) he called a halt to the examination.
He might have been unusually enthusiastic in his experiments, but Hammond’s fascination with cocaine was far from uncommon for a medical professional of his time. In early 1885, The Lancet laconically observed that ‘The medical press is full of cocaine just now.’ By the end of the year, the sheer volume of publications dealing with the substance had become ‘so extensive and so many sided that it is difficult to deal with it summarily’. Cocaine had been chemically isolated decades before, but it had mostly been seen as a scientific curiosity – an ‘obscure’ and ‘useless alkaloid’, as one medical journalist later put it. The substance’s sudden ascent from near-total obscurity to worldwide celebrity was due to a single, remarkable innovation: the discovery that cocaine was the world’s first local anaesthetic.
Thanks to cocaine, it became possible for the first time to eliminate pain without resorting to more powerful (and dangerous) general anaesthetics like chloroform. This sudden breakthrough captivated the public imagination in a way that few substances have, before or since. For many, cocaine seemed to convey the promise of the modern, technologically dynamic 19th century: a quickening new age of scientific revelations, new inventions and marvels on an industrial scale. The story of cocaine between the end of the 19th century and the start of 20th is the story of a slow change from technological wonder to dangerous drug of addiction. It is also a story that illustrates the ways in which individual substances can become loaded with ideological meanings, how those meanings can change as they spread through society, and how our perceptions of particular drugs are intimately bound up with our feelings about the people who use them.
Karl Koller was never to become as personally famous as his friend Sigmund Freud, but he did manage to make cocaine very famous indeed. In 1884, Koller was 27 years old and working as an intern in the eye surgery department of Vienna General Hospital. He was professionally ambitious and hoped that an important-enough discovery might allow him to apply for a position at one of the city’s large and prestigious eye clinics. To this end, he began doing laboratory work on experimental anaesthetics. Both ether and chloroform (the two anaesthetics primarily in use at the time) had side-effects that made them awkward to employ in eye surgery, and Koller hoped that he might make his name by finding a better alternative. It was Freud who introduced Koller to cocaine. Freud – then a similarly young and ambitious medical man – had been ‘toying’ with the idea of using the alkaloid as a stimulant and a treatment for ‘heart disease’ and ‘nervous exhaustion’. He asked his colleague to help him with his experiments, so Freud and Koller began ‘taking the drug by mouth’ and recording its various effects.
Karl Koller, c1900. Courtesy Wikipedia
Towards the middle of the year, Freud left on a month-long visit to see his fiancée while Koller continued the work on his own. He noticed that cocaine had a numbing effect when applied directly to the tongue, and it occurred to him that it might work similarly on the surface of the eye. After successfully anaesthetising first the eye of a frog, then a........