1850–1900

If 1800 to 1850 belongs to the Romantic self-experimenter, the next half-century belongs to the institutions: the laboratory, the medical journal, the asylum, the ethnographic field site. Chemists in French and German laboratories isolate the active alkaloids of the great vegetable intoxicants — cocaine from coca leaves (1860), mescaline from peyote (Arthur Heffter, 1897) — and in doing so transform plants into molecules and cultural practices into pharmacological objects.

In Philadelphia, Weir Mitchell publishes the first scientific account of mescal in 1896. In Boston, William James returns repeatedly to nitrous oxide and what Benjamin Paul Blood had named "the anaesthetic revelation," eventually weaving the material into The Varieties of Religious Experience. In Washington, James Mooney's Bureau of American Ethnology fieldwork on the Ghost Dance and the Kiowa peyote ceremony produces the first serious anthropological treatment of Indigenous visionary practice. The categories that will shape the twentieth century — addiction, hallucination, mystical experience — are essentially in place by 1900.

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