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THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
He had good reasons, too, for deciding that the scientific investigation of its potential should properly begin with experiments by the
investigator on himself. This was a practice that could be traced back
to the beginnings of Western science, but Freud’s self-experiment
marked a moment at which its legitimacy was being challenged. Drugs
that produced marked effects on the mind – altering moods, thoughts,
feelings and perceptions – were legitimate and often highly productive
subjects for scientific study, but they posed particular problems for it.
The evidence that they generated was not measurable or verifiable, and
could only be given from the perspective of their subject. Selfexperiment had always been a practice that split researchers in two,
making them both observer and subject, and forcing them to negotiate
a balance between the subjective and the measurable. Freud was
attempting to find this balance at a moment when the authority of the
trained scientist was becoming embroiled with commercial advocacy
for a booming pharmaceutical industry, and new and powerful mindaltering drugs were emerging more rapidly than the questions they
raised could be answered. The drug-taking scientist was a lightning
rod for these controversies, both within the fast-changing worlds of
pharmacy and medicine and among an anxious but fascinated public.
* * *
Across Europe and the United States, the 1880s was a decade of velocity
and acceleration. The first electric tram appeared on the streets of
Berlin in 1879, and in the United States in Cleveland, Ohio in 1884.
Cities were criss-crossed by cyclists, the countryside by trains, the seas
by ocean liners. The telegraph system was spreading its filaments across
the globe, making the price of goods in every port known instantaneously. Pocket watches were sold by the millions as working people
needed to synchronise their plans, coordinate with travel timetables
and manage their schedules in precise increments. This was a new way
of living, and there were many who believed it was placing a stress on
21
THE NEW ACCELERATOR
the brain and nervous system for which humanity was unprepared and
ill-adapted. New diagnostic terms such as ‘railway spine’ and ‘bicycle
face’ were coined for particular syndromes attributed to movement at
speed, while the pervasive stresses of modern life were captured in the
diagnosis of ‘neurasthenia’, a term popularised in 1869 by the American
neurologist and physician George Miller Beard.
Beard was a powerfully focused and energetic character with an
unlimited confidence in the explanatory power of science. He did not
invent the term, but he was the first to describe neurasthenia as a distinct
organic disease, and to diagnose its cause as modernity itself. He described
its biological mechanisms in precise detail. It had been recognised since
the eighteenth century, when Luigi Galvani demonstrated that the legs
of dissected frogs could be made to twitch by passing an electric current
through them, that the nervous system was driven by electrical forces. As
electrical theory developed, it encouraged a parallel model of anatomy in
which the brain was a voltaic battery that regulated the body’s electrical
force, and the nerves were the electrical wires that transmitted it. From
this emerged the idea of a ‘nervous economy’: if nervous energy was
spent faster than it accumulated, the inevitable consequence would be
‘nervous exhaustion’ and the collapse of the system.
4
The symptoms of neurasthenia could vary widely, but they
commonly included anxiety, dizziness, headaches, indigestion, nervous
spells, chronic fatigue, brain fog, insomnia and impotence. None of
these was new, but in his bestselling book, American Nervousness
(1881), Beard pointed repeatedly to the reason why they had reached
epidemic proportions: ‘First of all, modern civilisation.’5 The pace of
life and the demands of business and industry were pushing the human
machine beyond its natural limits. The ubiquity of pocket watches was
both a symptom and a cause of the disease:
The perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have some-
thing to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be
on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment,
22
THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
so as not to be late for trains or appointments . . . A nervous man
cannot take out his watch and look at it when the time for an
appointment or train is near, without affecting his pulse, and the
effect on that pulse, if we could but measure and weigh it, would be
found to be correlated to a loss to the nervous system.
6
Modern technology provided Beard with a topical metaphor for the
process. ‘Edison’s electric light’, he wrote, ‘is now sufficiently advanced
in an experimental direction to give us the best possible illustration of
the effects of modern civilisation on the nervous system.’7 The human
metabolism, like an electrical circuit, contains finite reserves of energy.
When the circuit is more and more heavily loaded, there comes a point
when ‘the amount of force is insufficient to keep all the lamps actively
burning . . . this is the philosophy of modern nervousness’.8 The accelerating diffusion of print and information, the rise in intensive education, and the scientific advances that were remaking daily life: ‘all these
are so many additional lamps interposed in the circuit, and are supplied
at the expense of the nervous system, the dynamic power of which has
not correspondingly increased’.
9
Neurasthenia became the disease of the age, not only through the
efforts of Beard and his fellow nerve specialists, but by public demand.
Most diagnoses of mental illness carried a powerful stigma of insanity or
moral weakness. The diagnosis of neurasthenia, by contrast, implied a
sense of martyrdom or heroism: a build-up of external stress that the
patient had fought valiantly to the point of exhaustion, when their
nerves had given way. Its symptoms were extremely common and,
unlike other common diseases – for example tuberculosis or cholera, for
which the German physician Robert Koch had recently identified
microbial causes – there was no biological marker or medical test to
confirm or reject the diagnosis. Beard himself treated it with electrodes
that passed a mild current across the body, a method that achieved some
success, though he suspected that part of this was ‘mental therapeutics’,
or what we would now call the placebo effect. The only real remedy, he
23
THE NEW ACCELERATOR
believed, was a root-and-branch transformation of society to reduce the
intolerable stresses heaped on its citizens and foster the emergence of a
less neurotic and healthier nation.
Sigmund Freud diagnosed himself as neurasthenic, and attributed his
condition to a career path that had left him overworked, stressed,
exhausted and often depressed. It had taken him eight years to complete
his medical doctorate rather than the usual five because he had simultaneously been doing laboratory research on invertebrate nerve fibres: he
was pushing forward on twin tracks, one towards a private practice as a
neurologist and the other as a university specialist. His initial scoping of
the medical literature on cocaine – which at this point amounted mostly
to studies of its natural source, the leaves of the Andean coca bush –
suggested that it had been ‘almost universally effective in improving
those functional disorders which we now group together under the name
of neurasthenia’.10 As he proceeded with his researches and experiments,
he became convinced that the drug might be able to supply precisely
what Beard believed the human nervous system lacked: a means of
increasing its capacity, rather than merely giving a temporary boost to its
energies at the price of subsequent depletion and exhaustion. If all the
varied symptoms of neurasthenia sprang from the same cause – a deficit
of nervous energy – the right drug might relieve them all.
‘It is a well-known fact’, Freud observed in his first published report
on the subject, ‘Über Coca’ (1884), ‘that psychiatrists have an ample
supply of drugs at their disposal for reducing the excitation of nerve
centres, but none which could serve to increase the reduced functioning of the nerve centres.’11 The nineteenth-century pharmacopoeia
was by this point rich in narcotics and sedatives: opium, the old staple,
had been joined by its pure and concentrated extract, morphine, as
well as anodyne vapours such as ether and chloroform, and the powerful
sedative compound chloral hydrate. Combinations of these drugs in
patent medicines, prescribed by physicians and sold over the pharmacy
counter, were widely used to treat neurasthenic symptoms such as
exhaustion, anxiety and overwork. But these were only palliatives that
24
THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
allowed patients a temporary respite before the unequal contest
between modern civilisation and the human nervous system resumed.
A stimulant that changed the equation by adding energy to the system
might offer a genuine cure.
Freud was, naturally, not the first person to have investigated such a
possibility. Several drugs had been pressed into service as stimulants,
but each had its limits. The most readily available was alcohol, which
was widely used in medicine, including as a pick-me-up in cases of
exhaustion, injury and weakness. But the boost in energy that it offered
was short-lived, and was succeeded by a depression of the metabolic
system that often caused a relapse into debility and stupor.
Unlike other regions of the globe, which were home to caffeinecontaining plants as well as other stimulants such as coca, khat or betel,
the flora of western Europe had no native energy boosters, and when
tea, coffee and chocolate arrived during the seventeenth century they
were hailed as medical marvels. They were, in the paradoxical phrase of
the time, ‘sober intoxicants’ that could revive the sick and energise the
healthy, increase stamina, sharpen the mind and banish sleep. In large
quantities, however, they overstimulated, causing unpleasant side-effects
such as nervous tremors, sweating and a racing heartbeat, overstraining
the nervous system rather than boosting it.
These high-dose effects were described by the author and prodigious
coffee drinker Honoré de Balzac, who drank dozens of cups a day while
writing his novels and, in his 1839 Treatise on Modern Stimulants,
admitted that ‘I consume it in such quantities that I have been able to
observe its effects on an epic scale’.12 Balzac’s coffee consumption
mounted to the point where ‘finally, I discovered a terrible and cruel
method, which I would recommend only to men of excessive strength’:13
swallowing handfuls of ground coffee beans without water on an empty
stomach until:
everything becomes agitated: ideas march like the battalions of a
great army onto the battlefield where the battle has begun. Memories
25
THE NEW ACCELERATOR
charge in, flags flying; the light cavalry of comparisons advances at
a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes in with its convoy
and its charges; witticisms appear like snipers; characters rise up;
the paper covers itself in ink, because the evening begins and ends
with a torrent of black water, as the battle does with its gunpowder.
14
Balzac managed astonishing feats of literary production on these doses,
but it was a Pyrrhic victory: an assault on the stomach and the brain
that brought ‘terrible sweating’ and ‘a weakened nervous system’ that
led him, eventually, to abandon his experiments. The effects of caffeine
at this pitch of intensity were frantic and unstable, too easily dissipated
in impatience, frustration and anger. Like alcohol, too, it reclaimed its
temporary loan of energy with interest: it was impossible the following
day to ignore the realisation that ‘coffee wanted a victim’.
15
During the 1850s, a range of ‘nerve tonics’ had appeared in pharmacies, but all were toxic and self-limiting. Strychnine was promoted
as a remedy, in three small doses a day: in 1884, just as Freud
was embarking on his experiments, the powerhouse of British science
T.H. Huxley had added it to his regime for treating exhaustion
(‘I suppose that everybody starts life with a certain capital of life stuff
& that expensive habits have reduced mine’).16 Arsenic was another
chemical tonic, the active ingredient in common patent medicines
such as Fowler’s Solution: ten drops, three or four times a day, could
restore the nerves, but it could equally bring on neurasthenic symptoms such as nausea, fatigue and headaches. Calomel – mercuric oxide,
dispensed in the form of ‘blue pills’ – was recommended for boosting
nervous energy as well as treating inflammation and stiffness, but this
too was toxic in anything other than small doses.
Neurasthenia treatments also encompassed a thriving market in electrical devices that claimed to boost the system by passing current through
the body, and by Freud’s time medical researchers were exploring drug
therapies far more alarming than cocaine. Charles-Edouard BrownSéquard, a professor of medicine at the Collège de France in Paris, had
26
THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
3. Cocaine arrived in a marketplace where poisons such as strychnine,
arsenic and mercury were sold as nervous stimulants.
been experimenting for some years with glandular extracts, particularly
from animal testes, on the basis of his belief that life-energies were
concentrated in semen and the glands that produced it. ‘If it were
possible’, he speculated in 1869, ‘to inject semen into the blood of old
men, we should probably obtain manifestations of increased activity as
regards the mental and the various physical powers.’17 In 1889, at the age
of seventy-two, Brown-Séquard announced to members of the Société
de Biologie in Paris that he had made a preparation of semen, blood and
27
THE NEW ACCELERATOR
crushed testicles from dogs and guinea pigs and given himself a course of
ten subcutaneous injections. He reported a return of youthful vigour
and increased ‘facility of intellectual labour’, though it seems implausible
that his serum could have been biologically active.18 Nonetheless, his
‘organotherapy’ became fashionable across Europe and America, and
was touted by therapists not merely as a remedy for neurasthenia but –
in a phrase also used by marketeers of coca and cocaine products – as ‘the
elixir of life’.
When set against the poisons sold over pharmacy counters, electropathic corsets or Brown-Séquard’s self-experiments, Freud’s investigation of the stimulant powers of cocaine seems not reckless but positively
sober. Historians and biographers, as well as the older Freud himself,
have been quick to cite youthful ambition as a primary motive for his
research; but if he had an impetuous streak, he also had a cautious one.
On becoming engaged to Martha Bernays, he asked her to embroider
for him two samplers, or ‘votive tablets’, to brighten up the walls of his
drab university rooms. One was to read ‘Travailler sans raisonner’
(‘Work without reasoning’) – a recipe for neurasthenia – and the other
‘En cas de doute abstiens-toi’: ‘When in doubt, abstain’.19 His engagement to Martha, the daughter of a Jewish family wealthier and of higher
status than his own, was a romantic match that he celebrated in high
literary style in their correspondence, but it was also bound up with his
keen hunger for success; and if cocaine could make his fortune, it would
smooth his path to an advantageous marriage. But his urge for discovery
coexisted with his injunction to self-control. His self-experiments came
to be seen as impetuous and excessive, but with hindsight their more
serious flaw was his reluctance to test the new drug to its limits.
Freud’s first letter to Martha on the subject of cocaine records his
initial steps. His attention had first been drawn to the drug by a report
in a medical journal, the Deutsche Medicinische Wochenschrift, the
previous year. An army physician, Theodor Aschenbrandt, had secretly
added cocaine to the drinks of his Bavarian recruits during their annual
weapons drill and observed that it made them better able to endure
28
THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
hunger, heat, strenuous exercise and marches. ‘In this way,’ he concluded
confidently, ‘the soldier can dispense with food for eight days.’20
Cocaine, Freud learned, had been isolated in 1860 from the leaves of
the coca plant, after which it was named; since then it had been available from Merck’s pharmaceutical catalogue, but little investigated. Its
high price was a deterrent, particularly since the scattered assessments
of the coca leaf’s potency were inconclusive. Many of the samples
shipped from South America to Europe over the years lost their stimulant properties on the journey, and some chemists had concluded that
their reputed effects were based on exaggerated reports from the natives
of the Andes.
In the USA, however, cocaine was being enthusiastically promoted,
particularly in the Therapeutic Gazette, a monthly journal published in
Detroit under the aegis of the Parke, Davis pharmaceutical company.
Parke, Davis had built up an unsurpassed range of medical products,
many extracted from plant sources: their bestseller, the laxative cascara,
was derived from a bark long used medicinally by the indigenous peoples
of the Pacific north-west. In 1880 the Therapeutic Gazette published a
glowing testimonial to cocaine by the physician W.H. Bentley, who
recommended it for the treatment of opium, morphine and alcohol
habits. Cocaine, Bentley wrote, was ‘capable of producing the most
exalted mental feelings, far more ecstatic than anything ever experienced
from the use of opium or alcohol’; and unlike these other drugs, ‘its
effects pass away gradually after a few hours, leaving a feeling of buoyant
serenity, not to be succeeded by any depression’.
21
Bentley appended a series of case histories: as was usually the case in
journals tied to pharmaceutical companies, all were successful cures. In
1884 Parke, Davis added a tincture of coca to their catalogue and
dispatched their most experienced botanical researcher, Henry Hurd
Rusby, to Bolivia with instructions to secure a large supply of coca
leaves. Rusby brought back a huge haul of 200,000 leaves but discovered, as others had before him, that most had spoiled on the return
journey; he proceeded to develop a technique for preserving the cocaine
29
THE NEW ACCELERATOR
yield by making a crude but stable extract in makeshift laboratories in
South America. With their new supply of pharmaceutical cocaine in
the pipeline, Parke, Davis were poised to become the world’s largest
supplier, and to bring its exorbitant price down to earth.
Aschenbrandt’s paper directed Freud to the extant literature on the
coca leaf in Spanish, German and Italian. Much of it derived from selfexperiments, and had previously been collected by the aristocratic
explorer and biochemist Baron Ernst von Bibra in his 1855 monograph, Plant Intoxicants. Von Bibra travelled widely in South America
before settling into domestic life in his family castle in Bavaria,
surrounded by his extensive collection of art and architecture, where he
installed a large home laboratory in which he analysed the contents of
plants, foods and drugs. His account of coca quoted extensively from
the botanist Eduard Pöppig, who had travelled in the Andes in the
1830s, and presented the leaf not as a beneficial stimulant but the
deleterious habit of a primitive race. ‘The lower the mental faculties of
a nation,’ Pöppig wrote, ‘the coarser the narcotics it derives pleasure
from.’ In his account, coca’s habitual users became pale, weak and sick,
causing them to waste away, and yet ‘it has never been possible to break
the vice of a coquero, as a true coca addict is called in Peru’.
22
Von Bibra’s personal experience was quite different: ‘Pöppig’s judgment seems to us rather hard and severe, in regard to both the psychological and physiological effects.’23 During his own visit, he had several
opportunities to ‘get acquainted with the pleasures of a true coquero’,
and to master the delicate technique of chewing the leaf in combination with the slaked lime powder that releases its alkaloids. He had
observed its use as an aid to energy and productivity, chewed by agricultural workers and particularly by those undertaking long journeys
on foot. However, von Bibra had personally found its stimulant effects
to be modest: apart from a mild loss of appetite, he noted ‘no sensation
in me that might have indicated a nervous excitement’.
24
A far more extensive report, and the one that influenced Freud most
powerfully, was that of the Italian neurologist Paolo Mantegazza, who
30