Sara E. Black. Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century. Intoxicating Histories. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022. 400 pp. $42.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-228-01164-4; $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-228-01143-9.
Reviewed by Zoë Dubus (Aix-Marseille University)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (January, 2023)
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Sara E. Black is a historian of medicine specializing in the contemporary history of France. Her research focuses on the history of psychotropic drugs and society's relationship to these substances, both from a cultural and medical perspective. Her new book, Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century, is based upon her PhD dissertation. This work, enriched by numerous graphs and illustrations and supported by a large bibliographic corpus, offers a fine and innovative analysis of the use of psychotropic drugs in the nineteenth century. Using sources mainly from the medical world but also from legislative, media, and cultural arenas, Sara Black takes a new look at psychotropic substances, breaking away from the traditional focus on addiction, which still constitutes the core of current historiographic research on the subject. Noting with reason that the phenomenon of addiction constitutes only one possible experience among a complex set of outcomes of psychotropic substance consumption, she thus offers a rich, original, and multifaceted study of the daily experience of nineteenth-century individuals with drugs.
The study of this "long nineteenth century" is quite relevant, since it is the moment of transition, for Western society, between the eighteenth century, still marked by the influence of Christian thought on psychotropic drugs as necessarily diabolical, and the twentieth century, during which the "war on drugs" became institutionalized and deeply impacted the representations of certain psychotropic substances, henceforth perceived as mortifying. In the nineteenth century, on the contrary, the industrial, economic, medical, and cultural contexts allowed for frequent and guilt-free recourse to psychotropic drugs, which became markers of modernity and which, in particular, freed humans for the first time from the inevitability of painful experiences.
Black explores in this book the consumption throughout the nineteenth century of six psychotropic substances with particularly diverse properties and effects: opium, hashish, morphine, cocaine, ether, and chloroform. Refusing to separate these products according to their current legal status, she instead focuses on the most important psychotropic drugs for medicine and individuals of the time. She organizes her research around the idea of free will, which guides the whole book. According to her, this notion dominated most aspects of nineteenth-century society, and it allows us to study the history of psychotropic drugs in a new way. The book is divided into five chapters exploring the variety of uses of these substances and the interpretations which surrounded them throughout the nineteenth century. The thematic plan allows analysis across the various products with distinct chronologies, and makes the reading very dynamic.
The first chapter explores the development of the use of opiate preparations within the pharmacopoeia, showing how the mastery of these analgesics established the legitimacy of official medicine in relation to other forms of care. It gives an initial overview of the spread of psychotropic drug consumption throughout society, thanks to the increase in opium cultivation and the modernization of its production. The second chapter offers a surprising analysis of the self-experimentation practices of members of the medical profession using ether, cannabis, and morphine. These practices, widely publicized in the medical and popular press of the time, are nevertheless little studied by historians; Black offers here a subtle study of them. The third chapter focuses on the use of psychotropic drugs, particularly high doses of morphine, to try to cure the insane, in a context where the notion of addiction had not yet emerged. She then questions medical responsibility in relation to the first cases of morphine addiction, and ends with an innovative study of the criminal responsibility of morphine addicts. Could morphine addicts declare themselves not responsible for their acts because of their addiction?
The fourth chapter treats the question of the links between sexuality, chemical submission, pleasure, and the consumption of psychotropic drugs in depth, and opens with an analysis of the medico-legal debates surrounding the use of narcotic substances: some sleeping patients accused their doctors of rape. Black shows the paradox of the representations surrounding psychotropic drugs, sometimes presented as aphrodisiacs that could pervert individuals, and sometimes as dangerous poisons that destroy procreative faculties. In the fifth and last chapter, she analyzes evolving conceptions of pain among medical practitioners but also among individuals, who now had substances that allowed them to be freed from pain. She shows, for example, how the use of anesthetics was gendered between surgical use in wartime for men and in childbirth for women.
This fascinating work is an important contribution to the understanding of the practices of care, pleasure, and experimentation made possible by psychotropic drugs in the nineteenth century. While certain analyses might have been improved by a better critique of the sources, which are sometimes taken too literally, the reflection proposed here by Sara Black considerably enriches a historiography that has until now been too concentrated on the phenomenon of addiction, by showing how much the use of psychotropic drugs was in fact anchored in the practices of the French, and by extension of Westerners, in a complex and varied set of consumptions.
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Citation:
Zoë Dubus. Review of Black, Sara E., Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2023.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58368
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