Self-experiment

Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide

Humphry Davy's account of breathing nitrous oxide at Thomas Beddoes's Pneumatic Institution in Bristol in 1799, from the fourth part of his Researches. The excerpt gives Davy's own experiments, including the session that ended with "Nothing exists but thoughts!", and the reports he collected from Robert Southey, Peter Roget, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Wedgwood.

Hashish and Mental Alienation

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.

The Hasheesh Eater

Fitz Hugh Ludlow's account of his cannabis use as a young man in Poughkeepsie and at Union College, published anonymously in 1857 when he was twenty-one. In this excerpt (pages 18–26) he finds Cannabis indica at a local apothecary's shop, reads about it in the Dispensatory, and takes his first doses.

Ayahuasca in Villavicencio's Geografía de la República del Ecuador

An 1858 Ecuadorian account of ayahuasca visions and divination

Manuel Villavicencio's 1858 geography gives an early Spanish account of ayahuasca among Indigenous groups of eastern Ecuador, including divination, warfare, illness diagnosis, visionary effects, and a first-person report of his own experience.

The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy

Benjamin Paul Blood's privately printed 1874 pamphlet, the source of the phrase "anaesthetic revelation." Hosted here is the section in which Blood, after nearly fourteen years of experiments with anaesthetics, describes the insight that comes at the moment of "coming to." William James reviewed the pamphlet that year and later quoted this passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Note on Nitrous Oxide, from “On Some Hegelisms”

The note William James added to his essay "On Some Hegelisms" in Mind (1882), reporting nitrous oxide experiments he made after reading Blood's pamphlet. He describes a sense of metaphysical illumination and reconciliation of opposites that fades on recovery into "a few disjointed words and phrases." James reprinted the note in The Will to Believe (1897), and Charles Tart excerpted it in 1969 as "Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide."

Consciousness under the Influence of Cannabis Indica

The Yale psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture takes an alcoholic extract of cannabis to test the common claim that it stretches time and space. He reports strong fluctuations of attention and a sense that objects and events had become remote, and compares these with laboratory findings on attention.

Anhalonium Lewinii (Mescal Buttons)

A Study of the Drug, with Especial Reference to its Physiological Action upon Man, with Report of Experiments

Prentiss and Morgan conducted the first American clinical study of peyote at Columbian University on buttons supplied by ethnologist James Mooney. They recorded physiological effects alongside subjects' first-person accounts of visions, including kaleidoscopic colors and dissociative experiences.

Effects of Anhelonium Lewinii

S. Weir Mitchell's account of his own peyote self-experiment on May 24, 1896, read before the American Neurological Society. Mitchell describes detailed visions and includes a second self-experiment by a colleague, Dr. Eshner, with physiological notes and subjective observations.

Physiological Action of Anhalonium Alkaloids

A pharmacologist at St Thomas's Hospital reports systematic experiments on Anhalonium alkaloids using frogs, cats, dogs, and rabbits, combined with self-experimentation. Dixon's account is more clinically restrained than Weir Mitchell's or Ellis's but adds music-color synaesthesia and comparisons to cannabis and strychnine.

Mescal: A Study of a Divine Plant

A Study of a Divine Plant

Havelock Ellis's account of his own peyote self-experiment, conducted on Good Friday 1897 in his London chambers. Written for a general scientific audience, it situates his diary of jewel-like visions within the clinical work of Prentiss, Morgan, and Weir Mitchell, alongside Indigenous religious use of the plant.

Anaesthetics Antient and Modern

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.

Study on the Active Principle of Yagé

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.

LSD, a Phantasticum from the Ergot Group

Werner Stoll's first systematic clinical study of LSD, examining sixteen healthy volunteers and six schizophrenic patients, plus Stoll's own self-experiment. Published in 1947 following Hofmann's 1943 discovery at Sandoz, it established key vocabulary for psychiatric LSD research.

On Pellote (Second Communication)

Leipzig pharmacologist Arthur Heffter (1859–1925) reports his separation of five alkaloids from mescal buttons, among them mescaline ("Mezcalin"), and a series of self-experiments made between June and November 1897. Testing the whole drug, its resin, the mixed alkaloids and each isolated base in turn, he found that 0.15 g of mescaline hydrochloride alone reproduced the visions, slowed pulse, dilated pupils and loss of time sense produced by the cactus. Hosted here are the description of mescaline and its salts and the whole of section VI on the drug's action in humans.

Betty Eisner's first LSD trip

The psychologist Betty Eisner (1915–2004) recalls being the first research subject in Sidney Cohen's LSD study at UCLA in October 1955, quoting at length from the report she wrote after the session. The excerpt describes the psychological tests she was asked to take while under the drug, and her sense that they were trivial beside what she was experiencing. It is the opening chapter of her unpublished memoir, Remembrances of LSD Therapy Past (2002).