An Anatomy of Addiction: When Two Brilliant Minds Met a 'Miracle Drug'

By LEV GROSSMAN Friday, Aug. 05, 2011

An Anatomy of Addiction by Howard Markel

On Sept. 15, 1884, in Heidelberg, Germany, a demonstration took place that electrified the European medical establishment. An audience of distinguished eye surgeons at a medical conference watched as a dog was brought on stage. A doctor squeezed a few drops of a clear liquid into the dog's left eye, leaving its right eye clear. When the doctor waved his forceps in front of the dog's right eye, it naturally flinched. Then the doctor lightly touched his forceps to the surface of the dog's left eye. It didn't even blink./.../

The audience erupted. They had just witnessed one of the great moments in the history of anesthesia. The wonder drug was cocaine.

But it wasn't the cocaine we know today. When we first meet it in the distinguished medical historian Howard Markel's rich, revelatory new book, it's something else entirely. Markel's An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine is like the early pages of a family photo album, showing us cocaine as it has not been seen for over 100 years. The drug was pharmaceutically pure enough, to be sure, and plenty potent, but cocaine is now an institution, with its own politics and its own economics and its own malevolent cultural mythology. Back then it was just a novel chemical compound like any other: innocent, newly refined, culturally neutral, stripped of any meaning, its future bright and still full of promise.