Sources in this era
4 results
1812Fly Agaric among the Koryaks in Langsdorff's Bemerkungen
Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff · Source
Langsdorff's 1812 German voyage account records fly agaric in Koryak trade with Russians and Kamchadals, noting in a footnote that Koryaks preferred it to brandy as a stupefying or intoxicating substance.
AnthropologyPsychoactive Plants
1821Niopo among the Otomac in Humboldt and Bonpland's Personal Narrative
Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland · Source
Humboldt and Bonpland's Personal Narrative describes niopo snuff among the Otomac on the Orinoco, including preparation from Acacia niopo, nasal apparatus, missionary testimony, and comparison with curupa.
Indigenous KnowledgeEthnobotanyAnthropology
1831Paricá among the Mura in Spix and Martius's Reise in Brasilien
Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix · Source
Spix and Martius's 1831 German travel narrative describes paricá among the Mura, including preparation from dried seeds, ceremonial use, insufflation through tubes, and comparison with fly agaric intoxication.
Indigenous KnowledgeEthnobotanyAnthropology
1845Hashish and Mental Alienation
Jacques-Joseph Moreau · Source
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.
PsychiatryCannabisMedicine
Historical overview
On April 9, 1799, Humphry Davy inhaled nitrous oxide at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol and recorded the experience in prose that the next half-century would treat as a model. Researches, Chemical and Philosophical (1800) opens the modern Anglophone literature of self-experiment with altered states. Within a generation Coleridge would publish 'Kubla Khan,' De Quincey the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), and Théophile Gautier his sketches of the Club des Hashischins.
The era's signature genre is the introspective first-person account: the experimenter is the experiment, and the experimental apparatus is the prose itself. In Paris, Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, working at the Bicêtre, produced Du Hachisch et de l'Aliénation Mentale (1845) — the first sustained clinical psychiatric treatise on a hallucinogen, and arguably the first articulation of what Heffter, James, and Klüver would later develop into a full research program.
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Key figures in this era
Further reading
Secondary sources- Vetted secondary sources for this era are being prepared.