1800-1950 / Pharmacology

Moreau de Tours on dawamesc, self-experiment, and experimental psychiatry

Selected passages from Moreau de Tours's 1845 psychiatric treatise on hashish, including his insistence on personal experience, description of dawamesc preparation and dosing, and claim that hashish offered a unique experimental route into the psychology of madness.

Ernst von Bibra's German comparative account of Amanita and Cannabis

Selective excerpts from Ernst von Bibra's 1855 German survey of narcotic Genussmittel, focused on fly agaric and hashish. The passages show a mid-century comparative framework linking Amanita, Cannabis, opium, alcohol, travel accounts, chemistry, and differential effects across persons and places.

From the lecture on mysticism in William James's Gifford Lectures, delivered in Edinburgh in 1901–2. James argues that nitrous oxide and ether show "our normal waking consciousness" to be only one type among many, then quotes Blood and J. A. Symonds's chloroform experience. His notes add Xenos Clark's letter on the revelation and an Englishwoman's ether dream.

An Historical Sketch of Anaesthesia

An illustrated history of anaesthesia issued by the London drug firm Burroughs Wellcome & Co., which closes by advertising its own 'Wellcome' brand chloroform. Hosted here are the chapters on nitrous oxide, ether, and chloroform, covering Horace Wells's 1844 self-experiment, the ether demonstrations of William Morton and Charles Jackson, and James Young Simpson's 1847 chloroform trial.

A 1923 doctoral thesis reporting Fischer Cárdenas's isolation of the yagé alkaloid that Rafael Zerda Bayón had named telepathine (telepatina) decades earlier without isolating it. Seven case reports detail effects on human subjects, including the author's self-experiment, describing vivid dreams, visual hallucinations, and euphoria at low doses, followed by a systematic summary of physiological action.

Rouhier's two-part dossier for Bulletin des Sciences Pharmacologiques: a translation of Barriga Villalba's 1923 paper on alkaloid yagéine, followed by Rouhier's ethnographic and pharmacological notes. Rouhier catalogues dose-dependent effects and includes chemical analysis of a Jívaro preparation.

Berlin pharmacologist Louis Lewin announces his isolation of banisterine from Banisteria caapi and its identity to harmine. He describes animal experiments and preliminary human trials showing that banisterine relieved the muscular rigidity of encephalitis lethargica (post-influenza sleeping sickness).