ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Quickening Morpheus: Tracing the Disappearance of the Opiate Stimulus Effect (1850-1916)

• In Event: Better Living through Chemistry

English Abstract

From analgesia to the numbing stupor historically intended by the term ‘narcotic’—the effects of opiates are known the world over. But, for much of the 19th century, the potent effects associated with opium, morphine, and other ‘opium alkaloids’ were hardly so clear. Particularly in early 19th century Germany, the Brunonian system of medicine’s meteoric ascension to the centre of early 19th century Romantic science and medicine saw opium hailed as the ultimate stimulant of the vital force, only for Brunonianism to be dismissed as foolishness bordering on quackery a short decade later. The same cannot be said of opium’s stimulating effect. Scattered attributions of an excitatory-stimulating effects survived the great 19th century upheavals in physiology, organic chemistry, and pharmacology, resurfacing in the psychometric studies of experimental psychology before finally disappearing in the early 20th century. What happened to the stimulating effects of opium, once so copiously attested to in a diversity of experimental and observational contexts? This paper explores the ‘life’ and subsequent ‘disappearance’ of opium’s stimulant effect as an object of European experimental science in the mid- to late-19th century. Much as experimental phenomena are described as having lives of their own, it takes seriously the suggestion that experiential phenomena have a ‘life of their own,’ both as objects of experimental inquiry and in the lifeworld of embodied activity. Examining opiate stimulus as a historical effect embedded in shifting processes of competition and contestation alongside other effects, this paper seeks not only to reconstruct the fleeting existence of a localized experiential phenomenon, but to implicate the medico-physical events we frequently perceive as relatively ‘hard’ and immutable as negotiated across a greater plurality of collective life spheres.

Author

• Matthew Perkins-McVey, Technion