Hammond went on taking the drug in increasing amounts until ‘the sensations became rather painful than agreeable.’ He eventually pushed his tests as high as 18 grains (just over 1 gram) in a single dose, which caused him to become ‘oblivious’ to his own actions. He woke up in bed the next day with no memory of how he got there, and quickly discovered that he had, at some point in the night, decided to thoroughly wreck his own library. After this (and after recovering from a ‘most preposterous headache that lasted two days’) he called a halt to the examination.
He might have been unusually enthusiastic in his experiments, but Hammond’s fascination with cocaine was far from uncommon for a medical professional of his time. In early 1885, The Lancet laconically observed that ‘The medical press is full of cocaine just now.’ By the end of the year, the sheer volume of publications dealing with the substance had become ‘so extensive and so many sided that it is difficult to deal with it summarily’. Cocaine had been chemically isolated decades before, but it had mostly been seen as a scientific curiosity – an ‘obscure’ and ‘useless alkaloid’, as one medical journalist later put it. The substance’s sudden ascent from near-total obscurity to worldwide celebrity was due to a single, remarkable innovation: the discovery that cocaine was the world’s first local anaesthetic.
Thanks to cocaine, it became possible for the first time to eliminate pain without resorting to more powerful (and dangerous) general anaesthetics like chloroform. This sudden breakthrough captivated the public imagination in a way that few substances have, before or since. For many, cocaine seemed to convey the promise of the modern, technologically dynamic 19th century: a quickening new age of scientific revelations, new inventions and marvels on an industrial scale. The story of cocaine between the end of the 19th century and the start of 20th is the story of a slow change from technological wonder to dangerous drug of addiction. It is also a story that illustrates the ways in which individual substances can become loaded with ideological meanings, how those meanings can change as they spread through society, and how our perceptions of particular drugs are intimately bound up with our feelings about the people who use them.