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PROSTHETIC GODS
livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than
the imperfect and divided countenance, I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine.
Jekyll and Hyde was a popular sensation, and a pervasive influence
on the many gothic fictions of the fin-de-siècle that were hung around
the ambivalent figure of the drug experimenter. Often the protagonistvictim was a ‘brain-worker’, a high-risk category for neurasthenia and
the risky overuse of stimulant drugs: as the leading French physiologist
Charles Richet described them in the Popular Science Monthly, ‘poisons
of the intelligence’.77 An exceptional mind was no defence against them;
the keener the intellect, the more liable it was to turn destructively on
itself under their influence. Enervated scholars had long run the risk, in
fiction at least, of being driven out of their wits by sleepless nights
under the influence of coffee or tea, but the arrival of newly potent
stimulants allowed authors to stretch the consequences into the domain
of the supernatural. The bestselling fantasy author George Griffiths, for
example, in his short story ‘Genius for a Year’ (1899), imagined an
author tormented by suspicions of his artistic mediocrity and driven to
experiment with some hashish mailed to him by his brother from
Calcutta. After taking the first dose, he seemed to be observing himself
from a distance as he, or his alter ego, wrote page after page effortlessly,
eyes burning ‘with a fierce light that might have been either insanity or
genius’.
As the drug wore off, ‘his two beings seemed to fuse together and
become one’, and he fell into a dreamless sleep.78 When he awoke and
read his nocturnal scribblings, he recognised the work as a masterpiece
beyond anything he had previously written. For a year, genius possessed
him, but as he read over his nearly completed novel, ‘he saw that it was
beautiful, but it was utterly strange to him. Who had written it?’ In a
flash of illumination, he swallowed all his remaining hashish pills, and
‘visions of chaotic splendour chased each other in headlong haste
through the death-dance of his expiring senses’. He was found dead, his
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writing table ‘strewn with pages filled with the most hideous nonsense’,
ending in an ‘unintelligible scrawl’.
79
A similar fate befell the protagonist in Arthur Machen’s ‘The Novel
of the White Powder’ (1895), in which ‘an innocent-looking white
powder, of which a little was dissolved in a glass of cold water’, gradually transformed Francis, an anxious and bookish young man, into ‘a
lover of pleasure, a careless and merry idler of western pavements, a
hunter out of snug restaurants, and a fine critic of fantastic dancing’.80
His friends, who had blamed his long hours of study for ‘a little mischief
in the nervous system’, were initially delighted, but his sister became
concerned when she noticed a sinister mark on his skin, between thumb
and forefinger. Soon Francis confined himself to his room, refusing
visitors; when his friends finally forced the door, he was revealed in an
advanced state of ghastly physical corruption.
Machen was drawing on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890) as much as Jekyll and Hyde, and the visceral and hallucinatory
dénouement looked forward to the twentieth-century’s pulp horror,
particularly that of his great admirer H.P. Lovecraft. The stimulant
white powder was revealed to have been a toxic batch that had been
decomposing on the damp shelves of the local pharmacy for decades,
but its true danger was that it granted unearned pleasure, a corrupting
influence that negated the sense of shame and – a distinctive refrain in
Machen’s horror fiction – self-disgust. Francis’s final dissolution in his
bedroom reflects fin-de-siècle theories of nervous disease and degeneration, and connects the gratification from a drug such as cocaine with
the ‘solitary vice’ of self-pollution: an empty and mechanical pleasure
that, far from increasing the reserves of nervous energy in the system,
drains them beyond repair.
The most extended engagement with cocaine in the fiction of the era
was, of course, in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, and Arthur Conan
Doyle’s handling of the theme is an eloquent illustration of the shift in
public opinion through the 1890s. The great detective’s early adventures
are the ones most liberally spiked with drug references. Initially, Holmes’s
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detective work seems almost to play second fiddle to his self-experiments:
in the first published short story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, we hear of him
‘alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition’, until he
‘had risen out of his drug-created dreams, and was hot on the scent of some
new problem’.81 In ‘The Five Orange Pips’, which appeared in The Strand
Magazine of November 1891, Dr Watson describes him as ‘a self-poisoner
by cocaine and tobacco’.82 But it was the appearance of The Sign of Four in
1890, the year The Strand established itself as the leading purveyor of illus-
trated fiction and Sherlock Holmes as its undisputed star, that his drug
habit was most memorably established. In its celebrated opening lines:
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With
his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and
rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested
thoughtfully upon the sinewy arm and wrist, all dotted and scarred
with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp
point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the
velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
83
‘Which is it today,’ Dr Watson asks, ‘morphine or cocaine?’ This is
the only occasion on which Holmes is described as a morphine user: in
subsequent stories, his habit is confined to cocaine. It may be that
Doyle decided that injecting morphine seemed too much like a medical
condition, whereas cocaine could be interpreted as a vice or eccentricity
of character. Still a practising doctor at this point, Doyle was familiar
with both drugs: indeed, in 1891 he spent a few months studying
ophthalmology in Vienna, where Köller’s discovery of cocaine anaesthesia had transformed eye surgery. The tenor of conservative medical
opinion was captured authentically in Dr Watson’s disapproving
comments on Holmes’s habit – ‘it is a pathological and morbid process,
which involves increased tissue-change, and may at last leave a permanent weakness’ – a serious-sounding diagnosis that is nonetheless so
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vague that it could refer to anything from masturbation to keeping late
hours or living in the tropics. It succeeds, however, in prompting
Holmes to the plainest and most enduring statement of his motivations. ‘My mind,’ he replies,
rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the
most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am
in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial
stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for
mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular
profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.
84
Here Doyle places stimulant drugs at the centre of both Holmes’s
professional world and his inner life. He is a brain-worker, craving
stimulation but also indulging a neurasthenic and self-destructive
streak. He is described elsewhere as a victim of ‘black moods’, constantly
swinging from obsessive work to periods of depression – ‘in the
dumps’ – where he speaks to no-one for days on end.85 At the same
time, he is a committed aesthete: his hand-tooled injection kit marks
him as a connoisseur as much as his meerschaum pipe and his
Stradivarius violin. Doyle was at this time immersed in the ‘yellow’,
decadent writings of Oscar Wilde, whom he met in 1889 at a dinner
at the Langham Hotel in Bloomsbury hosted by J.M. Stoddart, editor
of Lippincott’s Magazine, which led to the publication of both The Sign
of Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Holmes is a lover of art and
pleasure, tantalisingly immune to public opinion; it seems likely that
Doyle had Wilde, among others, in mind as he elaborated the bohemian character and lifestyle of his languid, cosmopolitan sophisticate.
Holmes remains unusual among detectives in acting not out of a thirst
for justice or compassion for the victims of crime, but simply a desire
to keep himself amused. His detection is an art practised for art’s sake.
As the Sherlock Holmes stories grew in popularity through the
1890s, the character’s cocaine use came to suggest a seedy and disrepu-
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table edge that Doyle had not intended. In the early 1900s the Holmes
stories were acquired by Collier’s, a major player in the lucrative US
magazine market selling over 250,000 copies a week. But Collier’s was
concurrently running a series of investigative pieces entitled ‘The Great
American Fraud’ that exposed the prevalence of narcotics in patent
medicines, a campaign that contributed to the regulation of the pharmacy trade by the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. A cocaine-injecting
detective was out of step with the new times, and Doyle, who had in
any case been mentioning his hero’s drug use less and less, took steps to
terminate it. In the short story ‘The Adventures of the Missing ThreeQuarter’, published in Collier’s in November 1904, Dr Watson
announced that he had successfully ‘weaned’ Holmes from the ‘drug
mania’ that had threatened to check his remarkable career.
86
Further adjustments were made when the American actor-writer
William Gillette brought Sherlock Holmes to the stage, first in the
United States in 1899 and then a triumphant residency in London’s
Lyceum Theatre in 1901. The injection scene from the opening of The
Sign of Four was included, but the exchange between Holmes and
Watson was rewritten:
WATSON: These drugs are poisons – slow but certain. They
involve tissue changes of a most serious character.
HOLMES: Just what I want! I’m bored to death with my present
tissues and am out after a brand new lot!
WATSON: Ah, Holmes – I’m trying to save you! (Puts hand on
HOLMES’ shoulder)
HOLMES: (Earnest an instant; places right hand on WATSON’s
arm) You can’t do it, old fellow – so don’t waste your time.
87
The languorous satisfaction of Holmes’s habit is gone, replaced with
the fatalistic self-pity of the doomed drug addict.
* * *
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8. The actor William Gillette in the 1899 Broadway production of
Sherlock Holmes. Gillette injects himself with cocaine while Dr Watson
(Bruce McRae) looks on disapprovingly.
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Cocaine was removed from Coca-Cola in 1905, and banned from
general sale in the USA under the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 and
in Britain by the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920. In later life, Sigmund
Freud rarely mentioned the ‘cocaine episode’, the term adopted by his
biographer Ernest Jones. Jones’s biography dispatched it with a brief,
partial and evasive account; his phrase positioned it as a diversion from
the main narrative of Freud’s life and work, or perhaps a nervous breakdown to be passed over discreetly.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud wrote up his dream of
‘Irma’s Injection’, in which he was confronted with a past medical
error; the dream led him to recall the death of Fleischl, but he interpreted it to mean that he should allow himself to move on from his
lingering guilt over the tragedy. The damning details of the Ernst
Fleischl case were only fully exposed decades later, when copies of his
long-classified letters to Martha were discovered in his archives.88 In his
Autobiographical Study of 1935 he accounted for his study of cocaine in
one paragraph, referring to it as ‘a side interest, though a deep one’. He
suggested that Carl Köller had beaten him to the discovery of its anaesthetic properties because Freud had broken from his work schedule to
visit Martha. As he recalled, he had been quite happy for Köller to have
received the credit, ‘and I bore my fiancée no grudge for the interruption of my work’.
89
In these later writings, Freud made no reference to cocaine’s stimulant and euphoric qualities, nor to any early insights the drug might
have given him into the causal connection between mental states and
physiological responses. Yet he never entirely lost his interest in the
search for methods to increase the sum of nervous energy in his system.
In 1923 he submitted himself to another, lesser-known experiment
along these lines: the rejuvenation therapy developed by the Austrian
endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, who claimed that his operation could
restore its subjects to a ‘second youth’ by ‘revitalising the glandular
system’.90 According to Steinach’s theory, fatigue and loss of vitality in
later life were caused by a decrease in testosterone; this could be arrested
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and reversed by a partial vasectomy in men, and by the application of
X-rays to the ovaries in women. Just as the young Freud had theorised
that cocaine might increase the reserves of energy in mind and body,
Steinach argued that his ‘vasoligation’ procedure restored the potency
of the seminal canals and raised the levels of vigour and energy available to the metabolic system.
Freud had been diagnosed that year with the cancer that would
eventually claim him, and he may have been persuaded that the treatment would slow its progress.91 Orthodox medical opinion regarded
‘Steinaching’ as a crank practice, along with the ‘monkey-gland’ therapies touted for rejuvenation at the time; in 1923 Conan Doyle
published the classic Sherlock Holmes spine-chiller ‘The Creeping
Man’, in which an ageing professor’s experimental treatments with
‘serum of anthropoid’ cause him to scamper around the exterior walls
of his house at night like a monkey.92 Steinach’s work was a continuation of the hormone therapy first trialled by Charles Brown-Séquard in
his self-experiments with blood, semen and crushed testicles in the
1880s, while Freud had been investigating cocaine. As so often with
pioneering self-experiments, it had taken a while for the productive
applications of these researches to emerge. In 1894 ‘gland medicine’
yielded its first promising drug, extracted from the adrenal gland and
named adrenaline. It acted on the nervous system in a similar way to
cocaine, dilating the pupils and boosting the action of the heart.
Adrenaline spurred the search for new stimulant drugs, and in 1929 a
synthetic compound with similar properties was discovered: amphetamine. With cocaine’s medical use by this time mostly confined to local
anaesthesia, amphetamine took on many of the applications that had
been claimed for it in the 1880s: from battlefield stimulant to cognitive enhancer, diet pill to anti-depressant. Before long its medical
promise was undermined by its non-medical use as a drug of pleasure,
much as cocaine’s had been half a century before.
In 1929, the same year that amphetamine was synthesised, Freud
reflected in his Civilization and Its Discontents on whether such drugs
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were remedies for the disease of civilisation or symptoms of it. ‘What
decides the purpose of life’, he wrote, ‘is simply the programme of the
pleasure principle’; yet the pursuit of pleasure cannot avoid being forced
into conflict with reality.93 In this age-old struggle, ‘the crudest, but also
among the most effective among the methods of influence is the chemical one – intoxication’. Drugs give us an edge over our circumstances:
‘not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired
degree of independence from the external world’, by offering temporary escape from pain, fatigue or boredom.94 Yet they can never actually
resolve our conflicts with the external world, and they often end up
weakening our ability to manage them. In themselves they are neither
disease nor cure; their benefits and dangers are, as James Lee maintained, a function of how we deploy them. They have played an
enduring and intimate role in civilisation’s control over the forces of
nature: they are part of a formidable toolkit that extends from the
mastery of fire to the modern technologies that extend our mental
reach through everything from writing to photography to the telephone. In the modern age:
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts
on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs
have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble
at times . . . Future ages will bring with them new and probably
unimaginably great advances in this field of civilisation and will
increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our
investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel
happy in his God-like character.
95
As Freud came to recognise through his psychoanalytic practice, one of
the most intractable obstacles to therapy was the wish of his patients
not to be cured. Pain and pleasure were not so easily separated; in their
different ways, both gratifying our instincts and relinquishing our
suffering are difficult and frightening prospects.
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