Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

 

 

The “Infernal Chemistry” of the 19th Century

The Opiates between the “Witchcraft Paradigm”

and the Development of Modern Toxicology

 

 

Abstract: During the 19^th century, in the absence of a legal interdiction and of scientific research on its effects, drug use acquired a multileveled mental representation of its positive and negative aspects. My study focuses on the change which took place during that period regarding the representation of drugs, from a mysterious, dangerous chemistry (what we call “the paradigm of witchcraft” and magic) to a scientific vision, through the birth and development of toxicology. The first section of the article deals with the evolution of the literary/cultural and social representations of poisons and drugs (opiates in particular), in parallel with the scientific developments. The main subject of discussion is the inheritance of a certain imagery regarding drugs, the „obsession” of finding a panacea in both paradigms, as well as the association of opium to a miraculous remedy and then to a „demonic” substance. The second section deals with the ambivalent relation of the modern artist to the drug, which is due to the perception of opiates as both a way of access to Paradise, and as a diabolic attraction.

Keywords: Romanticism; Witchcraft; Opiates; Laudanum; Morphine; Heroine; Addiction; Toxicology; Panacea; Poison

 

 

The tradition of a “dangerous/ infernal chemistry” was for centuries related to the mysterious techniques of witchcraft, while, by contrast, the 20th century places addiction in a medical paradigm, associated with legal prohibition. The switch from a mainly religious perspective to a scientific one, which has taken place during the 19^th century, signified that the ethical (or theological) and magical imagery and vocabulary were replaced by biological and psychiatric metaphors, such as the notion of temptation, replaced by impulses or drives[1]. In which concerns the period, the theme can be discussed at different levels, as in the 19^th century the sciences concerning the drugs were not yet strictly specialised and independent. That was still allowing drugs and poisons to be a subject of interaction between disciplines, interesting pharmacy and toxicology laboratories as well as aesthetics, literary imaginary or philosophical discourse. Toxicology as a science is born in direct connection to the evolution of organic chemistry, bringing into the light the actions (perceived before as mysterious) of drugs and poisons. Pharmacy imposed the opiates, the term referring to opium and its derivates: laudanum, morphine and heroine. Of main interest will be the way the artificial hallucination reflects in the literary and social imaginary, a reflection which fluctuates from the opiates as remedies (pharmakon) to their perception as hallucinogens and then to poisons or lethal substances (toxikon), because of the effects of addiction and overdoses. This cultural and scientific background led to a specific, multileveled rapport in the mental representation of its positive and negative aspects, especially in the absence of a legal interdiction and of actual scientific certainties on its effects.

Thomas S. Szasz, in his work on the Ceremonial chemistry (an interesting variant of the title being the French translation, Les Rituels de la drogue), acknowledged the existence of two periods from the point of view of the religious, respectively scientific perspectives on drugs. Szasz speaks of the moral implications of the narcotic use, bringing to the fore the opinion that it belongs not to the domain of health and disease, but that it is a question of Good and Evil, considering the idea of addiction as being a mental disease a form of rejection of a religious practice. He insisted especially on the 20^th century attitude towards addiction, considering the entire history of drug prohibition as the history of a manipulation. Although the premise of his study belongs to a different area of research and interest, his criteria being the prohibition of drugs no matter the system of believes, Szasz’s description and comparisons between the two attitudes is revealing for our study on the transgression from the religious/ witchcraft paradigm to a scientific one. He speaks about two systems, naming them theocratic and therapeutic[2] and placing the comparison in terms of political dominance[3]. In spite of us using the comparison in a distinct context, Szasz’s one to one correspondence between two periods and cultural perspectives (Christian/ religious and scientific) is certainly of great interest here. The author’s main concepts, which are considered equivalent in the two stages, or paradigms, as we call them, are: dominant ideologies: religious/ Christian versus scientific/ medical ideology, priests/ physicians, heretics/ sorcerers, quacks, faith/ scientific knowledge, hope/ scientific research, charity/ treatment, holy water/ therapeutic drugs, Satan/ Christian science and everything that defies the medical authority, sorcerers’ substances or chemistry/ the “hard drugs”, Inquisition/ institutional psychiatry. The researcher makes an observation which is significant for the paradoxical idea of continuity in the change of paradigms of the imaginary, that there is one thing that different religions and parties agree on: the “scientific fact” that certain substances are dangerous[4]. Szasz speaks of the 20^th century anti-addiction treatment, writing that “a religious scenario was adapted to medical terms”, but we can make use of the comparison and adapt it to the 19^th century social imaginary. The latter carried its ‘obsessions’ for miraculous or dangerous potions into the medical background, where a first age of research was interested in the discovery[5] of a messianic panacea (a remedy or treatment that can cure all diseases), while later the ‘ghost of addiction’ forced them to start a fight against the new “disease”[6].

The search for a panacea[7] seems to have always belonged to the social imaginary, especially in the first paradigm (when treatments usually consisted in mysterious potions prepared by the initiates, such as the white sorcerers[8]), but also later, when it moved into the foreground of 19^th century medical research. Christian Bachmann and Anne Coppel observe that before the second half of the century, as the therapeutic medicine was making its first “hesitating” steps, the physicians had no way of relieving pain. “Despite the inefficiency of their solutions, the panaceas were numerous: opium, alcohol, blood taking and mercury chlorate”.[9] With all the variety, researches agree that the “cure-all” of the 18^th and 19^th century this was certainly opium[10] and its derivates. 19th century physicians recommended opiates for a large variety of diseases from pain to cough, diarrhoea, dysentery and so on, based on the real therapeutic properties of the drug, which was perceived, in a period when there were no many others alternatives, as a miracle, a “G.O.M.” – “God’s own medicine” [11]. For example, laudanum[12] “was used in many patent medicines to relieve pain… to produce sleep… to allay irritation… to check excessive secretions…[…]. The limited pharmacopoeia of the day meant that opium derivatives were among the most efficacious of available treatments, and so laudanum was widely prescribed for ailments from colds to meningitis to cardiac diseases, in both adults and children. Laudanum was used during the yellow fever epidemic.”[13] The second half of the 19th century is marked by the generalisation of the use of morphine, which although isolated around 1805, was widely spread especially after 1853, due to the discovery of the hypodermic needle. “Morphine[14] was first used medicinally as a painkiller and, erroneously, as a cure for opium addiction. It quickly replaced opium as a cure-all recommended by doctors and as a recreational drug and was readily available from drugstores or through the mail”[15]. During the last decades of the century, physicians use in their fight with pain and addiction other solutions, such as the newly discovered heroin[16], which, unfortunately, was even more dangerous in its side-effects.

As we can easily observe, the negative pole in the perception and representation of miraculous/ mysterious substances (which evolve from ‘potions’ to chemical formulas) takes the image of the danger of addiction, and also that of opiates as poisons (associated with overdosing, accidental or not). The invisible, unperceivable action of such “dangerous substances” led to a survival of an older fear (inherited from the witchcraft paradigm): poison has projected itself in the social imaginary as a form of refined, atomized death[17], “a particularly disloyal and insidious homicide […which] involved the appeal to certain mysterious mixtures”[18]. In spite of the evolution of toxicology and the progress in the chemical analyses and in other tools of determining the presence of poison in a body, the results were approximate and the anxiety, the suspicion and fear (as a “real psychosis of contamination of the body”[19]) remained, although the “anguishing obsessions towards mystic associations”[20] changed into the perception of a more pragmatic sort of danger.[21] The scientists were speaking of the “demonic powers” of morphine[22], so the apparently abandoned religious paradigm returns in terms of the representation of the new danger and the anguish it arose: “In the invention of drug addiction, the first stage[23] is that of anxiety. [The enthusiastic physicians discover that] pain is demonic, but morphine is an even more harmful demon”[24]. Speaking about the historical evolution of poison, Jean de Maleissye made an observation which can illustrate very well the connections between the two poles (positive and negative): “So, from poisons to potions, from potions to remedies a transition takes place; […] the borderlines between medicine, quackery and witchcraft have always been blurry, and they are even today [25].

The diagram of the evolution of science regarding the complex drug-poison (and in particular the opiates, as the main drugs of the 19^th century) is that of a contradictory period. Real progress or development could not avoid uncertainty, oscillation or faults, some of them of great consequence, such as the treatment of many patients not with less harmful remedies, but, in spite of the good intentions, with more and more addictive substances. Still, even if delayed, the discovery of this danger is of much help in preventing the appearance of more victims and has a major consequence the legal prohibition of opiates in the 20^th century.

Louis Lewin, a German pharmacologist and professor interested in poisons, is the author of one of the first works on the toxic substances and the reactions they give to the user.[26] In 1874 he writes about chronic morphine addiction, although the substance was very much used and appreciated. About 1884, he wrote against Freud’s conclusion on the benefits of cocaine in the treatment of morphine. Lewin is the author of a detailed classification[27] of the “dangerous chemistry”, still a reference in the study of this, unfortunately edited only in 1924.

“During many years the remarkable and, for that time, quasi miraculous effects of morphine would conceal the risks and inconveniences. It would require ten years more, until 1870, for certain physicians […] to perceive the danger of the new remedy and ask for a strictly controlled use. […] But the warnings of Laehr, Levinstein or certain French practitioners would do nothing. With the 1880s, morphine would become the object of a rather ordinary fashion, both for its extent, as for its literary and artistic extensions. Imprudently prescribed by physicians who had this way replaced laudanum […], this «sovereign medication» would rapidly spread”[28].

Later on, heroin became the favourite opiate; “even more in the popular imaginary, heroin replaced very soon all other substances regarding the diabolic symbol of drug addiction.[29]

Going back to the hesitations of the 19^th century scientific research on drugs, we can say that if nowadays the most accurate rapport between substances can be established, no matter if the substances are toxics or belong to usual medication, the 19th century started with the absence of a real scientific basis, toxicology being favoured afterwards by the evolution of complementary sciences such as chemistry.

“Organic chemistry was, at the beginning of the 19^th century, an almost unknown area. Of course, discoveries regarding organic bodies have accumulated from the Middle Ages. […] Still, the chemist lacked the necessary keys for the study of organic chemistry. When he would discover them, the evolution of this discipline would take place with an amazing rapidity.”[30]

The development of the field of organic chemistry starts at the beginning of the 19^th century (between 1811 and 1826) with the annulment of some previous rigid classifications (such as the belief that organic bodies were animated by a vital fluid and that they could not be isolated and studied separately) and therefore with the appliance of the same basic science to all objects.[31] “Accumulating detailed but not very useful descriptions, in spites all admirable efforts of rationalising, the science of experts meets a dark, fascinating and tragic world, which gives accessible knowledge the feeling of their imperious limits, which no voluntarism, no matter as frenetic, doesn’t reach to push forward” [32].

François-Emmanuel Fodéré represents, for example, a first period in the study of toxics, through his attempt to synthesize substances on the basis of mainly clinical observations. The type of approach is descriptive, substances are animal, vegetal and mineral, volatile or fixed, emanating a distinct smell or not and so on. In 1825, Mathieu Orfila, medical chemistry and forensic medicine professor in Paris, a significant name for the 19^th century toxicology (he was called as an expert in many trials related to empoisoning) and also the first scientist to take in consideration the importance of chemistry in criminological research[33], imposes a new classification of toxic substances. Maintaining the primary classification of substances (animal, vegetal and mineral), Orfila organizes toxics in irritating/ inflammatory poisons, narcotic or hallucinogen (opium and its derivates used at the time were considered to be part of this section), septic or inducing decomposition.

Throughout the century the dynamics is the most important feature of the research concerning what we called “dangerous chemistry”, so a new step in the evolution of the science of poisons and drugs is signalled by Ambroise Tardieu’s more detailed classification in 1867, accepted by scientist and used with no change until the end of the 1890s. As far as opiates are concerned, their classification is the same as in Orfila’s research, being considered “narcotic poisons”. In spite of the excitement caused by the scientific discoveries, which at the moment give the impression that there are no more questions without an answer in the field of toxicology, the evolution of the science in the 19^th century takes place in a sinuous manner, as studies try to discover as accurately as possible the essential facts: how substances modify under different circumstances, how they act upon the body and which is the precise lethal dose. One the most necessary answers regarded the establishing of proportions, the dosage, because, as Paracelsus observed, “All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.”[34] The science acknowledged the fact that the distinction between a remedy and a lethal substance depended of the chemical analyse and its evolution. “The gloomy and worrisome face of poison is hidden behind every medicine. Before being part of the vast therapeutic arsenal that man possesses today, many products, and not the less important, were considered among the most dangerous substances nature has created. Still, man […] managed to subdue these deadly toxics, to shape their effects in order to retain only the pharmaceutical attributes which the scientist wished to allow”. [35]

On an opposite position to this vision of science as a powerful, even messianic solution to the problems of a ‘dangerous chemistry’, Thomas Szasz observed that as the Western Christian society had once faced the problem of witchcraft, the contemporaneous scientific world confronted the problems of drugs on medical terms. He also makes an interesting observation, that both paradigms are systems of manipulating people[36]: “magic and religion remain, without a doubt the best explanations and methods of control[37], being followed, he writes, by science/ medicine, which, with the help of legislation, place the role of an Inquisition in terms of drugs. He also notices that after the recognition of pharmacy and psychiatry as modern medical disciplines in the last two decades of the 19^th century, the scientists have searched without finding it drugs which will not create addiction, which would cure pain, help the sleep or the waking. Religion and science/ medicine, Szasz writes, have played the same role: to find the significance and purpose of their lives, of their existence[38]. Outside these polemics, philosophical or scientific discourse regarding the rights of the individual versus the important discoveries of science and their effects on the 20^th century everyday life, at the level of culture and social imaginary, what toxicology did was to imposes the scientific notions and criteria to a world which had belonged previously to magic, to a dark, mysterious laboratory associated with the most intimate fears and questions.

 

*

While for science and the social imaginary, the image of opium oscillated between panacea and poison (the latter as a metaphor of the “diabolic” addiction, but also as a pragmatic interpretation for the effects of the overdoses[39]), for many 19^th century literary movements, opium revealed its “paysages opiacées” with important aesthetical consequences. Artists found in the drug hallucination the access to “artificial paradises” but also, as they confess, to an inferno of addiction and of weakened will (“Les chercheurs des paradis font leurs enfers, les préparent, les creusent avec un succès dont la prévision les épouvanterait peut-être”[40], as Baudelaire writes). The literary and cultural movements establish four historical stages: first, the Romanticism, secondly, Baudelaire’s and modern poetry’s (pre)avant-gardism (Rimbaud, Symbolist and Parnassian poetry), then the fin de siècle society and culture (dandyism, decadent literature). As reflected in the literary confessions of the artists attracted in this “dangerous game” (the famous De Quincey, Coleridge or Baudelaire and many others), the drug had become the instrument for applying the Romantic, then Modern or Decadent aesthetics and philosophy. For such a literature interested in the powers of the imagination, in new means of expressing the inside, irrational faces of the human being and escaping the pragmatic reality of the industrial age, the artificial hallucination was priceless.

“Through their curiosity about the Orient and their desire for the exotic, the Romantics were introduced to the various stimulating drinks and drugs from which they hoped to find a means of escape to an exciting, exotic, poetic world which would have all the charm of Paradise. It is curious that the early European concepts of the Orient from which the wondrous spices were brought was that it was a Paradise. Belevitch-Stankevitch writes that: a lot of people were convinced that fine spices, exquisite to the point of being called divine, came right from the Paradise. As it was known that they came from Alexandria on the Nile, this river was identified with Gihon[41], the river of Paradise. For the credulous the spices and the precious wood were the fruits and branches of trees […] had fallen in its water and led by the currents to Egypt where people did nothing more than fish them out. Joinville says of the Nile that it is: a river that comes from Egypt and from terrestrial Paradise; and that they fish in its water […] would fall from the tries of Paradise when the wind blows[42].

„Coleridge and de Quincey, Rabbe, Nodier, Nerval, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire. […] Some have found in the opiate substances the remedy to their physical and moral sufferance. […] Therefore, whether we speak of a cognitive experience, an aesthetic research or, on the contrary, of the drug as a purpose, the use of narcotics was not, from the perspective of the beginnings of the 19th century, a defect or an abnormality and was under no circumstance considered as a “drug”, at least not with the meaning we use the word today, filled with a certain disapproval. Guilt was associated with the harmful effects bestowed on one’s own life and creation: the drug was not yet sanctioned by the social apparatus, nor by the medicine, which prescribed it frequently. Therefore is unconceivable to speak of taboo or of transgression of values: the forbidden did not exist.”[43]

The Good and Evil, the Paradise and Hell meant for writers as Baudelaire and his followers, but as well for some of the Romantics, a problem of aesthetics and regarding one’s own inner dramas and revelations.

“It’s all about the ethics of the Creator; narcotics, assuming that they can amplify genius, the creative imagination, deteriorate the will and make impossible the effort of composition; […] the sterile fruit of hashish and opium feasts has a name: the unknown masterpiece. The ethics referred to here is an aesthetic ethics”[44].

Szasz writes that the fascination of the Romantics for dreams anticipated the psychoanalytical methods of Freud and Jung. This fascination manifested itself all through the 19^th century, from Goethe to Baudelaire, Mallarmé to Huysmans and Heine.

“The song of the mermaids of the unconsciousness, silent after the suppression of the mysteries from Eleusis, came to life again in the pagan exuberance of the Pre-Raphaelites and Romanticism, in a certain fondness for opium (Beardsley’s, Odilon Redon and Rossetti’s paintings)”[45].

The sensation of the Artist is that, under the influence of the opiates, the spirit escapes the body, allowing the drug to lead it to a superior [46] realm, where perceptions rise above the human circuit.

“The morphine euphoria comprises two elements: a. An agreeable polarization of body sensations, […] «feeling of physical imponderability and intellectual sublimity, […] a particular trouble of the sense of time (…), associated with the impression that time exists no more; one stops perceiving the succession of hours and, on the other hand, one could believe he has lived, during a few minutes, a whole eternity », b. Imagination, the second element of the exhilaration interferes: «the effortless games of associating ideas, hyper amnesia with spontaneous evocation, unexpectedly rapid of events which previously seemed forgotten, the affluence and extent of intellectual combinations, of scientific and artistic creations, of megalomaniac projects and novelistic fantasies. The happy unity of senses was producing the sensation of divine health, the freed imagination tended to give the illusion of genius»”[47]

The ego of the creator, of the Artist becomes the centre of a universe lacking the traditional axis, Divinity[48], so, the «centre of the universe». The need to fill a central position, that of the Creator becomes the same with being temped by the divine:

“the Artist […] will represent nature as perceives it, through his imagination, this subjectivity being the only realism one can aspire […] we can translate this theory in religious terms by saying that God’s imagination created the world and thus dispose of a theological pattern for an aesthetic doctrine. The inspired poet is of course like God but, we realize, that we have to end the analogy here and doubt the angelic excitation and the misleading mirrors”[49]

If he is the centre that means the whole world has no other finality than the satisfying the needs of this ego: «all these things have been created for me, for me, for me» [Baudelaire]. Being the end of things, he is also the creator of it: «nobody will be amazed that that a final thought will rise from the mind of the one who dreams[50] is: I became God. Thus, the poetic mind whose ideal is to resemble Divinity in the process of creation of the universe identifies himself with God, but the price of this ecstasy is the impossibility of creation. »”[51] The obsessive repetition, in a positive and one might say imperative form, “for me, for me, for me” seems to acknowledge, in a paradoxical manner, a certain feeling of insecurity or doubt belonging to the space of absence and frustration. At the core of illusion as it is offered by the drugs, a negative revelation takes place, as a form of acknowledging one’s limits. Quoting Jean Starobinski, when he talked about the “infernal laughter” as equivalent to “the infernal punishment of one’s distortion”,[52] we can play a re-interpretational game: the divine image revealed to the artist in the distorted mirrors of opium hallucination becomes similar to the epiphany of an unsuccessfully imitated Creator. That is why the image is closer to the picture of mocked Divinity, rather than to the absolute Ego, searched in the eternal intoxication of opiates.

The illusion is that of experiencing the absolute («on vie plusieurs vies de l’homme en l’espace d’une heure»[53]), the access to plural experiences, out of the suffocating space of human destiny, which looses its limits and material consistency during the hallucination. The human measure is changed, transcended towards the divine, as narcotics satisfy the taste of infinity / le goût de l’infini, le goût du gouffre. G. Poulet spoke about the celestial time, the eternity, the infinity, while at the opposite extremity there was the infernal time and space as absence and emptiness[54]. In relation to the universe, the Ego feels as magnified into a clear, light form of consciousness, in which reflection realizes in perfect harmony with the self and the world, the first dominating the latter from the privileged position of centrality. The inner and outer universe is reorganized in accordance with the opiate revelation, in a hallucinatory illusion of substituting the Divinity, a paradoxical relation between what we call the “infernal chemistry” and the religious imaginary.

 

 

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