Name: AD Tour of Misbehaving Bodies
Location: Wellcome Collection

Today cocaine use presents a series of major problems for governments to tackle. But in the 19th century it was fervently hailed as the perfect solution to a very specific issue – safe anaesthesia during surgery.

In the modern popular consciousness, cocaine is usually defined by images of extravagance, violence and addiction. The spectacular wealth and self-annihilation of Tony Montana in the 1983 film ‘Scarface’, the National Crime Agency’s ‘Every Line Counts’ campaign, and Sadiq Khan’s condemnation of gang violence fuelled by “middle-class cocaine parties” all depict cocaine as simultaneously indulgent and destructive – the vice of the affluent. 

In the late 19th century, though, cocaine had a very different set of associations, which are largely forgotten about today. Before the harmful consequences of cocaine addiction were fully understood, cocaine was celebrated as a revolutionary medical technology: the first effective local anaesthetic.

In 1884 a young Viennese ophthalmologist named Karl Koller discovered that a mild solution of cocaine would, if introduced into the eye, deaden the nerves’ sensitivity to pain. News of the discovery spread rapidly through Europe and America, provoking ecstatic reactions from medical professionals and the public alike. In the first six months of 1885, over 60 articles on cocaine appeared in the pages of the British Medical Journal.

‘Cocaine’, the Scotsman, 29 August 1887

Christ is the patron of infirmaries, hospitals and homes, and cocaine is one of the blessed instruments of his pain-removing mission.

Henry Power of the British Medical Association wrote that “in the discovery of cocaine, a new era seems to have dawned”. The doctor and journalist Alfred J H Crespi described cocaine as “a discovery to captivate the imagination of mankind”. For the Scotsman newspaper, the new drug seemed to be an (almost literal) godsend: “Christ,” it wrote, “is the patron of infirmaries, hospitals and homes, and cocaine is one of the blessed instruments of his pain-removing mission.”

More: The many and varied drugs of Victorian Britain.

It’s hard for us now to grasp why cocaine anaesthesia provoked this type of rapturous (even religious) response. We live, after all, in a world where surgical pain relief is taken as a given, but late-19th-century options for anaesthesia were considerably more limited and problematic.

General anaesthetics like chloroform and ether had been used successfully for almost 40 years by the time cocaine entered the public consciousness, but these methods came with several problems – not the least of which was the worry that those who went under chloroform might never wake up. The danger of anaesthetic death was a consistent presence in the minds of surgeons and patients alike.

In 1894 Dr J McNamara penned a somewhat melodramatic letter on the subject to the British Medical Journal. “The records of death by chloroform,” he wrote, “are monstrous in their frequency. Is it not time to discard the lethal chloroform, and thus put an end to the human sacrifice that is weekly offered on [its] altar?”

With descriptions ranging from “gift from God” to “elixir of life”, the Victorians were effusive in their praise of the wonders of cocaine.

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Hall's Coca Wine advertisement.

If doctors were cautious of general anaesthesia, then patients were often even more so. One GP from the small Scottish town of Garlieston declared that: “There are many people who dread chloroform so much, that they decline to take it, unless practically coerced into doing so.”

Koller’s discovery offered a solution to the 19th century’s pain problem. Cocaine could easily eliminate pain by being rubbed onto a part of the body or being injected via hypodermic, and do so without the fearful prospects of unconsciousness and death. In this context it is easier to see why, at the time, cocaine looked like such a technological marvel. 

In July 1884, only months before Koller’s discovery was announced to the world, the Provincial Medical Journal counselled its readers that: “Scientific medicine, if it means anything at all, must aim at the relief of pain. And with the attitude of the public expecting relief, our duty is clear – to afford it.” As the 1800s drew to a close, it seemed like medical science had finally achieved this aim. A correspondent writing to Chambers’s Journal called the drug “a wonder of the age” and W H Dallinger, writing to the Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine described it as the “Ultima Thule of anaesthetics” – a reference to a fantastical island in Greek mythology that lay beyond the frontiers of the known world. 

It appeared that doctors now possessed a tool that might take them beyond the furthest frontiers of their own discipline, allowing them to effectively banish pain and perform the most taxing of surgeries with ease.

Many in the medical profession regarded cocaine as proof of what modern therapeutics could achieve with the aid of cutting-edge science. But the drug also intruded into the lives of everyday people in a variety of surprisingly intimate ways.

One of the most popular fictional characters of the era was also one of its most famous cocaine users. The opening scene of Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes novel, ‘The Sign of Four’ (1890), shows the great detective unpacking his “hypodermic syringe” from its “neat morocco [leather] case” and injecting himself with a 7 per cent solution of cocaine. 

Holmes had been enthusiastically received by Victorian readers from the first, with early reviews comparing the detective to some of the most influential figures of the age – the Scotsman newspaper called him “a scientific genius, a Darwin of detectives”. It might seem strange to us now that Holmes and his cocaine habit were so unproblematically received by Victorian audiences, but this makes more sense in the context of cocaine’s contemporary standing as an innovative, modern ‘wonder drug’. 

Advertisements produced in Europe for cocaine-based products often reflected colonialist attitudes towards native American peoples, on whose land the coca plant could be found.

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An Inca man requests a goddess of the Incas to hand over coca, but she refuses, holding a bottle of coca wine for herself.

Arthur Conan Doyle was trained as a medical doctor himself, and cocaine represented the newest triumph of medical technology. Having Holmes use cocaine (rather than some other drug, such as morphine or opium) was a useful shorthand to suggest the rapidity and technological precision of the detective’s mind. 

Victorian reviewers reacted enthusiastically to this idea. Newspapers the Graphic and the Morning Post observed that: “Mr Holmes shows forth all the gifts of his calling in high perfection. He never sleeps when he has a case on hand. His knowledge is encyclopaedic” and “he must be either engaged in unravelling a first-class mystery, or in consoling himself for the want of one with cocaine”. Cocaine, the medical wonder drug, seemed an ideal fit for the criminological superman.

Outside of fiction, the drug was also a daily presence for many people. For decades cocaine was the standard remedy for seasickness, hay fever, and for the congestion brought on by colds and flu. The Burroughs Wellcome Company manufactured a handy ‘cocaine spray’ cold remedy, small enough “to be carried in a waistcoat pocket”. 

Cocaine anaesthesia was also used for cosmetic surgery: Dr John O Roe of New York promised to painlessly resculpt his patients’ noses into the fashionable aquiline shape of the day. The Victorian celebrity tattooist Sutherland Macdonald frequently injected his clients with the drug before he began work, so that he could create even the most elaborate ‘statement piece’ tattoos without pain. Cocaine was so influential in enabling pioneering forms of rhinoplasty, cheiloplasty and skin grafts that the Hampshire Telegraph speculated that Victorian society might be on the edge of a new aesthetic age, where “a new countenance may be as easily ordered as a new bonnet”.

In looking back at the ‘revolutionary’ potential of cocaine for the Victorians, we are confronted with just how much our perceptions of medicines – and of medical technologies – can change over time. For us now, cocaine symbolises the dangers of crime and addiction, but for its earliest users, cocaine offered the tantalising promise of a modern age of medicine – an age without pain, of effortless surgery, and the easy modification of the human body.

Dr Douglas R J Small is a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the University of Glasgow, where he researches the history of drugs and medicine in Victorian literature and culture.

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Douglas Small

@DrDouglasSmall

Author

Essay

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Hall's Coca Wine advertisement with a modern drug awareness poster.

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Sniffing glue and Scientology in the DrugScope archive

Read about Drugscope, the leading UK organisation representing those working in the drugs field.

Use our guide on researching alcohol and drugs to delve into library materials and learn more.

Medicine Man

Visit 'Medicine Man' to learn about the pharmacist Henry Wellcome, his products and prolific collecting.

Today, cocaine has a very poor public image as one of the causes of crime and violence. But for the Victorians it was welcomed as the saviour of modern surgery.

Cocaine, the Victorian wonder drug

Western magicians and mind readers have long used the imagery of the ‘mystic East’ to reinforce their special powers and difference from ordinary audience members. Shelley Saggar argues that in today’s racism-infused political climate, it’s time to stop invoking these easy stereotypes.

In Western traditions, magic is understood in terms of opposition: it is superstitious rather than scientific; irrational rather than reasonable; strange rather than familiar. 

Western magical performers have long relied on cultural motifs to create a sense of spectacle and mystique, and a motley assembly of ‘exotic’ stereotypes have come to represent supernatural dangers and delights to awestruck audiences the world over. These range from Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to turban-wrapped mind readers and the infamous ‘Indian rope trick’.

These seemingly innocent borrowings from other traditions ultimately reinforce stereotypes about the threat of foreigners. Through their association with deception, misdirection and trickery, these stereotypes also reveal the psychology of just who we expect to deceive us.

The word magic stems from the Ancient Greek magos, denoting a member of the Persian educated classes. The word itself shares an etymological association with magi, familiar from Christian mythology as the title given to the Three Wise Men who came bearing exotic gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh upon hearing of the birth of the infant Jesus. 

The roots of exoticism are plain to see: learned scholars who are identified in the Bible as being “from the east” (Matthew, 2:1) are represented as those with understanding of alternative knowledge systems that diverge from our own. Practitioners of the magical arts, then, are immediately associated with cultural and intellectual ‘others’. From these roots we can see evidence of the drive to draw upon Eastern influences to create a sense of authenticity.

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Drowning trick

Arguably one of the most famous mind readers of the 1920s, Claude Alexander Conlin was a master of marketing as well as mentalism. His iconic posters give some sense of the myriad epithets he employed to distinguish his act above all others: ‘Alexander: The Crystal Seer’, the unfussy ‘Alexander’, and ‘Alexander: The Man Who Knows’. 

Alexander carefully selected elements of recognisably ‘Eastern’ cultural dress: paisley-printed robes and an elaborate turban, complete with a large feather, set with a jewel. This costume presented his audiences with an identifiable image of a mysterious ‘other’ who possessed secret knowledge that gave him access to the most intimate corners of their minds. 

Alexander’s invocation of the ‘other’ wasn’t just limited to his wardrobe. In several of his illustrated posters his complexion has been strategically darkened too. But his employment of ‘Eastern’ imagery was nothing new. Rather, he was playing to an established set of stereotypes in Western culture, evidenced in William Beckford’s troupe of Oriental occultists in his novel ‘Vathek’ (1786), Wilkie Collins’s “cursed Indian jewel” in the 1868 novel ‘The Moonstone’ and, as Palestinian-American cultural theorist Edward Said has so eloquently argued, in French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1879 painting ‘The Snake Charmer’.

The key to Alexander’s mind readings was an electronic earpiece that allowed him to receive transmissions from an assistant, who communicated crucial information about the audience participant. Cleverly concealed inside the turban wrappings, the device was hidden in plain sight, inside the very aspect of Alexander’s costume that explicitly coded him as a mysterious foreign figure. 

More: Go inside the ingenious world of onstage magic.

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Chopping in half trick

The assumption that Alexander’s character possessed mystical secrets that could penetrate even the most rational Western minds, and the implicit knowledge that this was, after all, a clever ruse, even a con, reveals a particularly insidious insight into the perceptions of the audience. They expected this kind of danger and deception from a man so obviously coded as Eastern. 

Even today, performers are continuing a long tradition of stereotypes about how we expect cultural ‘others’ to deceive us.

Alexander’s character acted as an antithesis to the sensibilities of his Western audiences. He was mystical where they were rational; his act threatened to reach into the safe distance between performer and audience; and crucially, he was ‘other’ while they were familiar. It is these artificial yet significant cultural oppositions that the authenticity and, ultimately, success of Alexander’s act played upon, binaries that persist to this day.

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Vanishing trick

In 2008, in the heart of London’s theatre district, the Garrick Theatre advertised a new show from popular British stage magician and television personality Derren Brown. The promotional poster that was used outside the theatre, as well as in the surrounding marketing campaign, depicted Brown turbaned and resplendently robed. The outfit would have been instantly recognisable to enthusiasts as a reference to Alexander. 

Even for those less familiar with the iconography of magical paraphernalia, the promises of an exotic Eastern mysticism in Brown’s promotional guise were surely still easy enough to read. Almost six decades after Alexander’s passing, the invocation of a foreign mysticism laced with the implicit fear of mind control and ideological domination still resonates. 

We can see this in the contemporary hysteria about immigrants ‘invading’, refusing to assimilate and supposedly forcing their cultures upon their adopted homelands that crowd newspaper pages, online forums and politician’s speeches. 

In a political climate such as this, the appropriation of cultural signifiers to advance a promise of implicit, however entertaining, deception can no longer be afforded the privilege of remaining ‘just a costume’. Even today, performers are continuing a long tradition of stereotypes about how we expect cultural ‘others’ to deceive us. Perhaps, then, we should work to create a new visual language to communicate magical spectacles, one that does not rely on the opposition of others.

Shelley Angelie Saggar is a research practitioner working in material history, museum cultures and decolonial methodologies. Her current work concentrates on the complicated colonial histories of secret, sacred and otherwise culturally sensitive items in the Wellcome historical medical collections housed at the Science Museum. 

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Shelley Angelie Saggar

Thomas is a London-based photographer working for Wellcome. He thrives when collaborating on projects and visual stories. He hails from Italy via the North-east of England.  

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Thomas SG Farnetti

Thomas S G Farnetti

Photographer

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Burning trick

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Dynamo on the past, present and future of magic

The magician Dynamo shares stories of history and inspiration.

Explore primary source material that illuminates health, medical and wider issues in society and culture.

Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic

Visit our exhibition – on until 15 September – to find out what magic and conjuring can reveal about the human mind.

Could modern magic shows be perpetuating damaging cultural stereotypes? Shelley Saggar shows how ‘exotic’ costumes and imagery are far from harmless fun.

Western magic’s fascination with the foreigner

Folk medicine remained popular in early 20th-century Britain, even as the professional medical establishment grew. Passionate folklorist Edward Lovett (1852–1933) made it his mission to discover the nation’s beliefs and superstitions, collecting amulets from cottage cupboards up and down the country. 

Kate is a Digital Editor for Wellcome Collection. When not submerged in a book, she can be found walking or practising Spanish. Sometimes both at once.

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Kate Wilkinson

@KAWilko

Image gallery

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Mole's foot amulet, Norfolk, England, 1890-1910

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, doctors believed that modern civilisation itself was making people sick.

Read Lovett's 'Folk-lore & legend of the Surrey hills and of the Sussex downs forests'

The Reading Room

Explore our display of amulets in the Reading Room.

Early-20th-century folklorist Edward Lovett made it his mission to discover the nation’s beliefs and superstitions, collecting amulets from cottage cupboards up and down the country.

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Contents of Henry Wellcome's pockets when he died

Explore stories inspired by the objects, manuscripts and more in our archives.

Stories inspired by the objects, manuscripts and more in our archives.

Inside Our Collections

Moles’ feet, dried frogs and other folk medicines

Rob Bidder is an artist based in south-east London and a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection. He also plays music in a ramshackle manner. He is a Gemini with a Libra ascendant.

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Rob Bidder

@robertbidder

Artist

Comic

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Memory

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A memory is just the leftover carcass of your mind's creative metabolisation of the past.

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Sport

Body Squabbles

Discover the mechanics of magic and the way that trickery works in the Smoke and Mirrors gallery. These live performances explore perception, deception and the ‘supernatural’.

Each performance is repeated twice per day and three times per week. During performances, the gallery may be busier than usual. 

<p>A performance taking place as part of an exhibition, live in the gallery space.</p>

In-Gallery Performance

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Smoke and Mirrors magic show by Will Houstoun

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We’ll be in Gallery 1. When you enter Wellcome Collection, it’s on the left on level 0.    

Gallery 1

Spaces are first come, first served and may run out if we are busy. You may wish to arrive early to claim a space. If you have any access requests or requirements, email us at access@wellcomecollection.org or call 020 7611 2222.

Limited spaces available

Experience magic in the Smoke and Mirrors galleries with live performances exploring perception, deception and the ‘supernatural’.

Smoke and Mirrors Live Performances

Hear about Asylum, “the magazine for democratic psychiatry”, and consider its historical context as well as its research significance and potential from a range of perspectives. In particular, this event will explore survivor voices, action and critique, and their importance to studies of the recent history of mental health provision in the UK. Following presentations from our speakers, there will be an opportunity to discuss their ideas.

Helen Spandler is Professor of Mental Health Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and recently held a Wellcome Research bursary to explore the back catalogue of Asylum, the radical mental health magazine. 

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Helen Spandler

Researcher

Anne Plumb is a grassroots survivor historian and member of the Survivors History Group. She has her own personal archive called ‘Ear to the Ground. Survivor and ally voices: organisation and action'.

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Anne Plumb

Speaker

Tony Baldwinson is a project manager and a non-disabled volunteer at the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, involved in the GMCDP Archive since the early 2000s and interested in radical mental health practices.

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Tony Baldwinson

Seminar

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Viewing Room event

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We’ll be in the Viewing Room. It’s next to the Library entrance on level 2, which you can reach by taking the lift or the stairs.

Viewing Room

Signing up for a free event does not guarantee a place on the day. Doors usually open 15 minutes before an event starts and we advise arriving before the scheduled start time to claim your place.

We hold some spaces for people with access requirements. To request one, please email access@wellcomecollection.org.

First come, first served

Hear about Asylum, “the magazine for democratic psychiatry”, and consider its historical context and research significance and potential from a range of perspectives.

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Researcher talk in the Viewing Room

Hear about some of the latest projects that explore materials from our collections, ask questions and take inspiration for your own research.

Exploring Research

Voices of Democratic Psychiatry

Discover two women conjurers living a century apart. Laura London will demonstrate her sleight-of-hand magic with cards. She will then offer a glimpse into her fascinating research on Talma, a Victorian magician who travelled the world performing as the ‘Queen of Coins’.

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Live performance event at Wellcome Collection

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Discover two women conjurers living a century apart. Laura London will demonstrate her sleight-of-hand magic with cards, and then offer a glimpse into her fascinating research on Victorian magician Talma, the “Queen of Coins”.

Experience magic in the Smoke and Mirrors gallery with live performances exploring perception, deception and the ‘supernatural’.

Performance by Laura London

Hear from stagecraft and lighting expert Jon M Armstrong, who will share impossible stories from his life in theatre and explain the tricks he uses to bring a touch of magic to a variety of theatrical productions.

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Performance by Jon M Armstrong

Listen in on a recording of a BBC World Service programme to hear about the findings of a major new global survey investigating attitudes to vaccines. The Wellcome Global Monitor asked people around the world whether they think vaccines are safe, effective and important for children to have. 

This programme is part of ‘The Evidence’, a series exploring the challenges our world face today. ‘The Evidence’ will be broadcast on the BBC World Service. 

The BBC World Service is the world’s largest international broadcaster. It broadcasts radio and television news, speech and discussions in more than 40 languages to many parts of the world.

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BBC World Service

Come and listen in to the recording of a BBC World Service radio programme exploring attitudes towards vaccines.

The free museum and library for the incurably curious

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