Drugs

On a framework of three sticks, meeting at the top, they stretch pieces of woollen cloth, taking care to get the joins as perfect as they can, and inside this little tent they put a dish with red-hot stones in it. Then they take some hemp seed, creep into the tent, and throw the seed onto the hot stones. At once it begins to smoke, giving off a vapour unsurpassed by any vapour-bath one could find in Greece. The Scythians enjoy it so much that they howl with pleasure. This is their substitute for an ordinary bath in water, which they never use.
— Herodotus (c. 480 BCE – 425 BCE), The Histories, Book 4, Penguin Classics, 295.

It is good not only in the fevers, diseases of the lung, cancers, scrofula, throat diseases, apoplexies, chronic disorders of all kinds but also as a general drink for infants.
— Bishop George Berkeley (1685 – 1743), on tar water.

In one method for measuring pain the levels of stimulus intensity between the threshold and the ceiling have been divided into 10 equal steps, called ‘dols’, from the Latin dolor, meaning pain. This ‘dol scale’ in the hands of experts has proved of some value in testing the efficacy of analgesic drugs, since it provides a rough measure of the ability of a given drug to raise the threshold for pain reception.
— W. K. Livingston, ‘What is Pain?’, Scientific American, March 1953, 59.

I esteem it the office of a physician not only to restore health, but to mitigate pain and dolors; and not only when such mitigation may conduce to recovery, but when it may serve to make a fair and easy passage.
— Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Of the Advancement of Learning (1605), Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1969, 133.

The Indian weed witherèd quite;
Green at morn, cut down at night;
Shows thy decay: all flesh is hay
Thus think, then drink Tobacco.

The ashes that are left behind,
May serve to put thee still in mind
That unto dust return thou must:
Thus think, then drink Tobacco.
— Anonymous (probably 17th century), Pipe and Can

There is an herbe which is sowed a part by it selfe … In the West Indies it hath diuers names, according to the seuerall places & countries where it groweth and is vsed: The Spaniardes generally call it Tobacco. The leaues thereof being dried and brought into powder: they vse to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it through pipes made of claie into their stomacke and heade; from whence it purgeth superfluous fleame & other grosse humors, openeth all the pores & passages of the body: by which meanes the vse thereof, not only preserueth the body from obstructions; but also if any be, so that they haue not beene of too long continuance, in short time breaketh them: whereby their bodies are notably preserued in health, & know not many greeuous diseases wherewithall wee in England are oftentimes afflicted.
— Thomas Hariot (1560 – 1621) and tobacco, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia.

It is also probable that by 1992 the present furore over drugs will seem as remote as the very similar hysteria over Prohibition does today.
— Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The Next Twenty Years’, Chicago Tribune Magazine, 1972

In the course of many centuries a few laboursaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook.
— W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973), ‘Writing’, in The Dyer’s Hand, Faber, 1963, 17.

You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.