Scion Of Vienna

Cocaine Lured Freud, Yale Surgeon Into Bowling Alleys, Drug Abuse: Books

Around the time readers first learned of Sherlock Holmes ’s turning to cocaine after a tough case, two of the medical world’s great minds were getting a serious buzz on for research, fun and abuse.

These actual early cokeheads were Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and U.S. surgeon William Halsted (1852-1922), the subjects of Howard Markel’s colorful study “ An Anatomy of Addiction .”

In the opening pages, we meet a young Halsted in May 1885 in a hospital dispensary. He “frantically searched the shelves” for cocaine, shot up and then bolted from the operating room where he was supposed to attend a compound fracture. He fled to his Manhattan home and “sank into a cocaine oblivion that lasted more than seven months.”

The drug wasn’t cheap then either, but Halsted was the scion of a dry-goods and insurance fortune. A jock and a dandy at Yale, his medical interests surfaced only in his senior year after some unrequired light reading in Gray’s Anatomy. Following two years of study in Vienna and several German cities, Halsted returned to the U.S. “a superbly trained surgeon, perhaps the best of his generation,” Markel writes.

Also in May 1885, we encounter Freud boasting in a letter to his fiancee about “how a dose of pure cocaine vanquished his migraine and inspired him to stay up until four in the morning writing a ‘very important’ anatomical study,” Markel writes.

Cocaine joined the Western pharmacopeia in the 19th century after traveling from Peru via conquistadors, naturalists and popular writers like William H. Prescott. The tendency of doctors then to freely prescribe narcotics inspired commercialization by drug companies of the time, such as John Searle, E.R. Squibb, Boehringer & Merck, and Parke, Davis & Co.

A clever French chemist mixed it with wine for a drink called Vin Mariani. The Vatican gave the concoction a medal, Ulysses S. Grant drank it while finishing his autobiography, and Queen Victoria and President William McKinley sang its praises.

Halsted and Freud both experimented with cocaine for legitimate medical purposes. Freud thought it would help a friend with his morphine addiction, while Halsted sought a local anesthetic.

Freud tended to go solo. The American initially had a cadre of students and young doctors providing research assistance and then some: “Halsted and his colleagues were quick to appreciate the sheer fun of ingesting cocaine. Theater events, dances, and even bowling matches at the University Club, a mere block away from Halsted’s home, were brightened by the white powder.

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