Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders
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got infected with Victor Frankenstein’s vision, and radically changed the underlying philosophy of medicine. From the ancient world on, doctors had aimed at restoring patients to health. Then, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the profession assumed a radically different goal: the prolongation of life—no, the extension of life—sometimes beyond a time when it made good medical sense. (This desire, too, has been passed down to us in the twenty-first century.) Well-known and respected surgeons in London even believed that they could reanimate the recently dead, as if the longer one remained dead the harder it would be wake up. This is no less than what Victor Frankenstein and hundreds of real scientists and writers also pursued in the period, expending their time and their souls in the pursuit of some special elixir, a magic potion, that would unlock that key secret of the universe: mastery over death or, turned another way, a hold on eternal life. But first there was that deep-seated, elemental spark to discover—as Victor Frankenstein put it—the “cause of generation and life.”
How different, Frankenstein from Pinocchio, but also how similar. “In 1849, before he became Carlo Collodi, Carlo Lorenzini described the Florentine street kid as the incarnation of the revolutionary spirit. Whenever there is a demonstration, said Lorenzini, the street kid ‘will squeeze himself through the crowd, shove, push and kick until he makes it to the front.’ Only then will he ask what slogan he must shout, and ‘whether it is “long live” or “down with”’ is a matter of indifference.”3 This passage is from a review of a book about the creation at the center of Collodi’s immensely popular and perdurable book, Pinocchio. Collodi imparted that revolutionary spirit to the heart of the children’s book when Geppetto, the lowly artisan, starts carving his puppet out of a block of wood only to pull off the ultimate miracle of the period—bringing Pinocchio to life as a young boy.
Collodi published his Pinocchio in 1881. It has been ever since one of Italy’s most treasured books: Italo Calvino, the great fantastical writer, confessed that Pinocchio had influenced his writing career his entire life. Toward the end of the story, Pinocchio begins to read and write. Through those two activities, he transforms into a “ragazzo per bene,” literally “a respectable boy,” or idiomatically, “a real live boy.” He looks at “his new self” in a mirror—a traditional way of representing self-reflection—and feels a “grandissima compiacenza,” which has been translated as simply “pleased.” Pinocchio is of course far from Frankenstein’s monster, but he arises out of the inertness of matter—in this case, out of wood. He begins as a puppet—controlled and manipulated and directed—but his master, Geppetto, imbues him with that revolutionary fervor of the street kid, a perfect blending of the political, the scientific, and the spiritual, in keeping with the interests of the late nineteenth century. Pinocchio “comes alive” in the broadest sense. The prize for his good deeds in the book is consciousness, the seat and secret of all life.
In the opening days of the new century—January 6, 1800, to be exact—Britain’s old and very staid Royal Academy got the search for the secret of life started. The Academy signaled both its approval and support for the quest in a peculiar way by announcing a prize of fifty guineas and a gold medal for the first person who could produce twenty pounds of raw opium from five acres of land. Settling on opium for its own experiments, the Academy had chosen a most ancient drug. In fact, the nineteenth century could have easily installed Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century physician, as patron saint of opium. According to legend, Paracelsus carried a sword with a hollow pommel in which he kept the elixir of life. Historians conjecture that the potion may indeed have been opium, which he affectionately called “the stone of immortality.” A contemporary description of his healing method links him closely with opium and connects him with the nineteenth-century belief in the essentialist qualities of that drug:
In curing [intestinal] ulcers he did miracles where others had given up. He never forbade his patients food or drink. On the contrary, he frequently stayed all night in their company, drinking and eating with them. He said he cured them when their stomachs were full. He had pills which he called laudanum which looked like pieces of mouse shit but used them only in cases of extreme illness. He boasted he could, with these pills, wake up the dead and certainly he proved this to be true, for patients who appeared dead suddenly arose.4
This is the sort of resurrective magic that drove scientific interest in the magical properties of opium.
An enterprising laboratory assistant named Thomas Jones claimed the prize money just after the century opened, by producing twenty-one pounds of opium from five acres that he had planted near Enfield, north of London. And the race was on. Opium tapped into some center of sensation, but no one knew for certain how, or where; and no one seemed able to control its effect. Nonetheless, from this moment on, chemists and physicians took the cessation of pain as the principal piece of evidence that they had homed in on that hidden center of power. The nineteenth century was shaping up as the century of the anodyne to such a degree that many scientists considered their experiments a success if they could eliminate pain in their subjects and maximize their pleasure. Even before Freud popularized the pleasure principle, the nineteenth century was hard at work putting that idea into practice.
Like every drug in this period, opium quickly moved out of the laboratory and into the streets. Doctors recommended it for virtually every illness, from a simple headache to tuberculosis to menstrual cramps. Up to the time of the first opium wars in the late 1830s, a British subject could freely buy opium plasters, candy, drops, lozenges, pills, and so on, at the local greengrocer’s. The English took to smoking opium, or ingesting a tincture called laudanum (from the Latin laudere, “to praise”), available, quite readily, at corner apothecary shops. Since laudanum sold for less than a bottle of gin or wine, many working-class people ingested it for sheer pleasure.
Some people, like the Victorian novelist Thomas De Quincey, perhaps smoked a bit too much. De Quincey started taking opium in 1804, and four years later found himself addicted. Even so, he could not stop himself from praising its exquisite pleasures. In 1821, he published his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in which he makes clear exactly what the scientists had hoped to accomplish. But his experience went well beyond science, and sounds, in its images of rebirth, vaguely like Paracelsus: “What a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes: this negative effect was swallowed up . . . in the abyss of the divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea . . . for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness . . . ”
America had no De Quincey. No one championed opium as the gateway to insight. Americans went after opium purely for enjoyment and recreation. And so, helped along in great part by the Chinese, who opened smoking dens in great numbers in the Far West during the 1849 rush for gold, opium attracted more users in America than in England. In 1870, in the United States, opium was more widely available than tobacco was in 1970. The Union Army issued over ten million opium pills and two million ounces of powdered opium to its soldiers. Both Kit Carson and Wild Bill Hickock wrote in their diaries how they passed many pleasant hours in those opium dens, much preferring smoking opium to drinking whiskey. Smoking left them with no hangover and, as a bonus, sharpened their shooting and roping skills to such a point, Hickock claimed, that he could perform their sometimes dangerous cowboy shows with not a trace of fear. In fact, he claimed invisibility on the stage. At the end of the nineteenth century, even the distinguished Canadian physician Sir William Osler, professor of medicine at Oxford, declared opium “God’s own medicine,” for, he said, it could perform miracles, not the least of which was curing all of the world’s ills.
Shortly after the Academy awarded its prize, a German chemist named Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner, eager to find in that magic poppy the active ingredient—termed its “essence” or “basic principle”—isolated an alkaloid from raw opium in 1805. He named it “morphium,” after Morpheus, the god of dreams; later it became known as morphine. For many years, Sertürner experimented on himself, trumpeting the drug’s ability to eliminate all worry and pain. At one moment, Sertürner wrote, morphine could induce feelings of a state so foreign and so elusive that the philosophers had to coin a new word to describe it, euphoria. But, he added, sounding a bit like De Quincey, the very next moment it could make