The Victorians' cocaine habit

In the 19th century, a magic new drug took the medical community by storm, riding a wave of scientific endeavour.

- Douglas Small

But, writes Douglas Small, it wasn't long before the dark side of this miraculous substance began to emerge

On a drab January day in 1890, journalist Marian von Glehn made her way through the “roar and rattle” of the City of London. Her destination, squeezed in among densely packed warehouses in the Moorfields district, was a massive, grubby, utilitarian building: the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital. Behind that unpromising facade, though, von Glehn was about to witness a miracle of modern medicine.

Writing for The Leisure Hour magazine, she recounted seeing a small group of nervous patients gathering outside an operating theatre. Surrounded by powerful gas lamps, reflectors and rows of “coloured phials that would have delighted the eyes of a Dutch painter”, the hospital’s nurses began to drift quietly among their charges. Into the eyes of these patients, nurses dripped a “newly discovered… magic drug” – one that would “deaden and allay the pain” of imminent operations and “inspire their patients with courage and confidence”.

The miraculous-seeming substance being administered was cocaine – and it soon captured the imagination of the Victorian public in a way that few other drugs have done, either before or since.

Numb luck

Cocaine was first isolated and extracted from the leaves of coca plants, traditionally cultivated on the slopes of the Andes, in 1855. It gained its well-known common name in 1860. However, the drug’s discovery initially passed largely unnoticed outside the specialised realms of organic chemistry. For the first few decades, one medical writer recounted, cocaine seemed to be nothing more than an “obscure [and] useless alkaloid”.