In the last decades, scholars have become increasingly interested in the role psychoactive substances play in the making of and expression of human culture. Given the proliferation of documentaries, news items and political debates on decriminalisation in recent years, it is perhaps no wonder that drugs have become a focal point of scholarly concern. Indeed, in the public spotlight are issues such as the off-label (over-)use of medication, the proliferation of opioid addiction (the ‘opioid epidemic’) in the last decade through over-prescription in the United States and a scientific and cultural reassessment of real risks that both legal and illegal drugs pose. Such topics, despite their more recent political, social and cultural resonances, have been salient for centuries, at least insofar as they appear in literary and cultural texts.1
This volume historicises the way medical and scientific knowledge came to provide systematic accounts of how drugs work by honing the way they are represented in literary and cultural texts, which challenge, anticipate, interrogate, participate in and criticise their medical counterparts. Most studies on drugs in literature and culture have focused on the history of addiction, and many have used literary biography as the main source texts (Milligan 1995, 2005; Davenport-Hines 2001; Boon 2002; Redfield and Brodie 2002; Ronell 2004; Reed 2006; Zieger 2008; Jay 2011; Comitini 2012; Mangiavellano 2013; Foxcroft 2016; Malek), often focusing on Thomas De Quincey (Abrams 1971; Schiller 1976; Rzepka 1991; Clej 1995; Morrison and Roberts 2008; Morrison 2011). There is, however, much more to be said about psychoactive substances and the connections human beings have to them. As Susan Zieger points out, the expansion of international trade meant that people “became enchanted with marvelous substances from exotic locales: spices, sugar, tobacco, chocolate, coffee, tea, rum. Imperial commerce in the period from 1500 to 1800 laid the groundwork for a ‘psychoactive revolution’” (4). During this period, and especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, knowledge about how drugs work on the brain, nerves and the body increased, and with this knowledge came a process of identifying and restricting their use. Breaking also from a tendency to emphasise the way writers used drugs as reflected in literary biography, this volume examines what contemporaries knew about how drugs affect the body, and what effects they have on mood, sensation, thinking and behaviour, in order to contribute to the discourse on addiction as well as to consider the cultural significance of psychoactive substances beyond addiction. There were, after all, many ways to use substances that were not based on drug-induced need.
The nineteenth century is a fascinating time to study drugs precisely because of the convergence of different medicines. One need only reflect on the experience of chemist Humphry Davy, who records his experimentation with nitrous oxide, stumbling his way into his own notion of the substance’s effects and its subsequent use: “My labours are finished for the season as to public experimenting and enunciation. My last lecture was on Saturday evening. Nearly 500 persons attended, and amongst other philosophers, your countryman, Professor Pictet. There was respiration, nitrous oxide, and unbounded applause—Amen. To-morrow a party of philosophers meet at the Institution, to inhale the joy-inspiring gas. It has produced a great sensation” (Davy 1858, 64). Experimentation with nitrous oxide (and a careful observation of its effects) led to the conclusion that the gas could function as an anesthetic drug: “Does not sensibility more immediately depend on respiration? […] As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place” (Davy 1858, 18). Indeed, as Davy’s experimentation shows, the nineteenth century was rife with attempts to ascertain particular effects of particular substances, which were put to use in an increasingly systematised way.
Coined by the pharmacologist David Macht in 1920, the term psychopharmacology is usually associated with the scientific study of drugs and their capacity to treat mental disorders. In this volume, we use the term to discuss the representation of drugs in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary and cultural contexts: contemporaries hypothesised about what might now be called drug action (even though in this time, drugs were thought to affect the body) and explored utilising certain substances for particular known drug effects. Our book differentiates itself from what has already been published on drugs in literature and culture by considering the role emergent psychopharmacological knowledges play in literary and cultural texts during the period when the field slowly began to develop. Nineteenth-century science was growing, dynamic and controversial—and with no separate concepts of psychology or psychiatry to speak of. The history of known drug effects dovetails with the development of others fields. The nineteenth century is crucial for the history of psychiatric medicine, for the development of a theory of addiction and also for a theory of drug effect that moves beyond humouralism.
Abandoning humouralist theories of the body that posited nerve system as tubes of liquids (which left little room for a theory of drug effect), these new methods included new materialist medical theories that afforded mechanical agency to inert substances. Many embraced an organicist materialist view of the body (see Ruston 2012, 24). One such theory was that of Brunonianism, which scholars such as Gavin Budge and Roy Porter have emphasised were influential on the development of medicine in general and psychiatry in particular (Budge 2013, 12–13, 56–57; Porter 1988, 89). Scottish physician John Brown posited that afflictions were the body’s nervous reaction to external stimuli caused by an under- or over-stimulation, dividing diseases into two classes, asthenic and sthenic, respectively. Drugs, and especially opium, were considered to be stimulants used to bring users back to a healthy state of equilibrium. Owing to Brown’s ...