Feb 7 2022
EP 4 Crack Quackery
In this sequel to Oh! Excellent Airbag (EP 2) we discuss the weird, wild, dark and inappropriate history of cocaine in medicine.
This program is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Crack Quackery
Emily: Welcome to episode four of Inappropriate History: Crack Quackery, where we are discussing the weird, wild, dark and inappropriate history of cocaine in medicine.
I'm Emily, and one day I will have my fucking history degree. It's gonna to happen!
Moxie: And I'm Moxy. I'm a true crime enthusiast.
Emily: You always say that with such a question.
Content warning. I'm going to be dropping the fuck bomb a lot today. Okay. You know what? I had my COVID shot earlier this week and that's just what I'm rolling with. So deal people. Deal. And get vaccinated. If you haven't gotten vaccinated and you're physically healthy enough to get vaccinated go out there. Don't be a plague rat. Taking a hardcore stance on this.
I'm gonna pop this right in here, starting with the history.
Quoting from history.com, "Once lauded as a medical wonder drug, experts now recognize cocaine as one of the most addictive substances on earth". Cocaine had many sources contributing to its rise in popularity in the medical field. I believe that Moxie had discussed a little bit about this. The chewing of coca leaves,
Moxie: Mm-hmm.
Emily: In ancient medicine.
Moxie: Right.
Emily: In the article. "What is... What is the crack? A brief history."
I, is that really? "What is the crack?" I feel like that's wrong.
I'm gonna check my, my notes. Cause I feel like I may have written that very, very wrong.
Moxie: But yes, back in ancient times they would chew the coca leaves and then spit onto the wound of the person so that their saliva with the coca mixed in it would act as an anesthetic.
Emily: I'm pretty sure it's not, "What is the Crack?" A Brief History of the Use of Cocaine as an Anesthetic. Melanie Redmond states, "Cocaine is an ancestor of [00:02:00] modern day anesthetics." Okay. It is. It's "What is the Crack?"
Moxie: Well, what is the crack?
Emily: What is the fucking crack? Well, crack is cocaine.
Moxie: Right.
Emily: I feel like I need a snappier answer for that. What is the crack? I'll tell you what the fucking crack is!
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: Vaginas!
... No, seriously, this does come up in this episode. So, I mean, I can't help you there. Well, I can help you cause I can educate you.
Yeah, that was a train that just got derailed. We just talked about how the cocaine is derived from the coca leaves. And this is something that, I don't remember what part of the world that was, you were talking about that they were chewing. The coca leaves in.
I don't remember anymore.
I don't remember.
Moxie: I wanted to say it was the Aztec, but I could be wrong.
Emily: Probably.
By the 1400s, the Incas had been chewing on coca leaves for centuries, but then in, oh yeah. Cause I, that makes sense if I don't say what I had to stay in the first place, back up, back up, back up.
So again, cocaine, coca leaves. People been chewing on it forever until the colonizers came through and destroyed medicine. And one example is the Incas were chewing on cocoa leaves for many centuries, but then in 1551, Peruvian Catholic bishops tried to get it banned on religious grounds. Like Western religions do. Ban fricking everything.
Moxie: It's true.
Emily: Screw coca! Let's use leeches!
Moxie: No, give us our cocaine.
Emily: Right. In true colonizer fashion, however, come to 19th century, white Europeans decided they needed to appropriate this medicinal plant and began studying the effects of coca leaves and analyzing its components.
In 1855 German chemist Freidrich. Oh my God, I should've looked up how to... We're just gonna put this into Google pronounce and see what, how it is said because just no, no. I'm not playing with this today.
Why are there so many fricking consonants?
Online Pronoucer: Gaedcke
Emily: I think it makes less sense now that we've heard the pronunciation than it did just looking at it. I don't understand.
Let's try it one more time. Just one more time.
Online Pronoucer: Gaedcke
Emily: Is that even a word? Does that sound anything more than gu-urg-k? I'm sorry, Frederick. Your last name is obnoxious to pronounce. I'm sorry. I understand that. Mine is too.
Anywhoo, Frederick, we're just going to call him Frederick, in 1855 had published a treaties on an active alkaloid extract of the coca leaf he called erythoxyline. This extract was, of course, cocaine. Though, not in its pure form. He published a description in the journal Archiv Pharmazie.
I said that very French and I'm pretty sure that it's very German. You have to hack up some more. Der Pharmazie! There we go. That's not how you say it at all, but we're rolling with it. Around that time, another Frederick, Fredrick Wöhlor who, I love this. This is actually a title. Okay. I am not degrading him. This is a fricking title, Ordinary Professor of Chemistry.
Göttingen university. Maybe I should look up how to say that one to.
🎵Copy.🎵
See that's what other people who don't have our Patreon are missing out on; is all the times I'm singing when I can't figure shit out.
Moxie: It's true. It's all the time.
Emily: Yeah.
Online Pronoucer: Göttingen.
Emily: It's like the first G is pronounced "guh", but then the second one is pronounced with an H.
Online Pronoucer: Göttingen.
Emily: University.
He had cocaine, erm "cocaine leaves", wow. Coca leaves imported to Germany by a Karl Von shite- I almost said that very wrong. Scherzer. I almost said shite-zer and that's no, his name was not Karl Von Shit.
A member of the Austrian Novara expedition. The Novara expedition went from 1857 to 1859 and was the first large scale scientific around the world mission of the Austrian Imperial Navy, which, I was going to rename it, "The Expedition of Sailing Around the World and Stealing other People's Shit."
Moxie: Oh, okay.
Emily: You know, it is. You know, it is. Wöhlor gave these leaves to Albert Neiman, who was his graduate student, to analyze. Naturally, he experimented with the coca leaves and the alkaloid he would end up naming "cocaine" on himself. That's what they did. He noted the alkaloid, "had a bitter taste, promoted the flow of saliva, and left a particular numbness followed by a sense of cold when applied to the tongue." Which is funny, cause Freud went back and forth. He's like sometimes it's cold. Sometimes it's hot.
Nieman isolated cocaine from the coca leaves in 1860. However, application of cocaine as a general anesthetic would still take time to be discovered and implemented. In the 1860s, French chemist Angelo Mariane was also experimenting with cocaine after becoming intrigued with coca and its medical and economic potential after reading Paulo, oh my God. What is with all these things I can't pronounce? Mantegazza's paper on the effect of coca. He concocted a tonic made from Bordeaux wine and coca leaves and called it Vin Mariani.
We talked about this in the last...
Moxie: Yeah, we were talking about Vin Mariani.
Emily: Yes.
Moxie: I thought it was with opium though. So I was wrong.
Emily: Yeah, Vin Mariani. There's no D.
Moxie: Oh, okay. Vin Mariani.
Emily: Yes. I learned something new. I learned a lot somethings new. I put that right there, about how we mentioned it last time. And it was popular among the artsy literary crowd. Now, what made this so effective in achieving that high, or that sense of vitality, is that the ethanol in the wine acted as a solvent and extracted the cocaine from the coca leaves.
It made it more intense than just like chewing the leaves or just drinking wine. It wasn't essence of cocaine. It was cocaine infused. If that makes sense.
Moxie: Yeah. That makes sense.
Emily: Advertisements claimed the popular drink could, "restore health and vitality."
This, I looked, I looked and I could not find what other drinks there were containing cocaine at that time. But the article I had read on this, that's history.com, were saying that the reason they put out this hard advertising campaign was because he was trying to compete with other cocaine infused drinks or other drinks containing cocaine at the time, but I can not find what they were. The only thing I can find, or the only thing I could find was that Vin Mariani inspired John S. Pemberton, gotta love that name, Pemberton, to develop a coca wine drink in 1885. Pemberton's French Wine Coca. Pemberton's recipe was basically a knockoff of the Vin Marinai. The only real difference was the addition of African kola nut- do you see where this is going- the beverages source of caffeine.
When Atlanta in Fulton county, Georgia had passed prohibition legislation later that year, Pemberton changed his formula to a carbonated non-alcoholic version of his French Wine Coca. He named the reformulated beverage Coca-Cola. For it's stimulant ingredients, coca leaves and kola nut.
I love how the states are all, "Alcohol, bad. Cocaine, yes, yes. Cool."
Moxie: Yes.
Emily: Cool beans, have that cocaine.
Moxie: Yay cocaine!
Emily: Just take that right out of context and have a clip of you going, "Yay cocaine!" No, I won't. I'll be nice.
Cocaine was removed from the formula in 1903 when they started realizing that it really wasn't a good thing for people to be consuming. The company found a way to separate the cocaine from the coca leaves so it had the same flavor, but wasn't going to kill you. Not that it really would have killed you because the amount of cocaine in Coca-Cola was very small. I mean, I dunno, you'd have to drink an awful lot for it to really have made an impact. And honestly, if you're drinking that much Coca-Cola to begin with, it's not the cocaine that's gonna kill ya. It's the sugar and the carbonation. Carbonation eats your bones.
In 1868ish, Moreno y Maiz injected cocaine into a frog's legs, conducting tests that led him to propose the possibility of using cocaine as a local anesthetic. The Moreno y Maiz findings, however, failed to spark public interest. At that point, no one really cared because nitrous oxide, chloroform and ether were already working. It wasn't until 1880 that cocaine actually mattered in the medical front.
Oh, wow. Here's another name for you? Vassily von Anrep published a paper in 1880 in which he suggested the use of cocaine for surgery. It's thought that he may have been the first one to use cocaine as a nerve block, but the evidence is lacking to back it up.
1884 was the boom year for cocaine.
William Halstead, one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, officially became the first to use cocaine as a nerve block in surgery. In those days medical trials were not what they are now. We just discussed this a second ago. They were highly unregulated shit shows; and if doctors weren't experimenting on the incarcerated, the impoverished and people of color, they were experimenting on themselves. For that reason, by the end of 1884 Halstead, and many of his colleagues found themselves addicted to cocaine.
This addiction ruined Halsted's career. To quote Dr. Howard Markel, medical historian and author of A History of Addiction in his interview with Betty Ann Bowser, "...at one point, he [Halsted] was called down to the emergency room, bombed on cocaine, and he literally pulled away from the table and said,'I can't operate', and walked out, took a cab back to his townhouse and skittered away the next seven months high on cocaine."
Halsted eventually committed himself to an insane asylum. With the lack of understanding about cocaine addiction, and the fact that conditions in those asylums were bullshit, he didn't really get treated and he spent the rest of his life struggling with addiction.
Dr. Carl Koller experimented with the use of cocaine as a local anesthetic for eye surgeries. He used this for a cataract removal and iridectomy, which is the removal of part of the Iris. Koller presented his results at the Medical Society of Vienna on October 25th, 1884. This was a big step in the advancement of cocaine being used as an anesthetic.
Sigmund Freud, I may be an idiot, but I just barely learned when I was researching this that he was a neurologist.
Moxie: Oh, okay.
Emily: I think some of us know about him from him as the father of psychoanalysis and know about his psychological work but he was actually a neurologist.
Moxie: I didn't know that.
Emily: He started experimenting with cocaine that year as well. And I'm going to put a pin in Freud. We're going to circle back to him because holy shit, that is a story and a half.
In 1885, American neurologist, James Corning, who had been a colleague of Halsted, took these applications of cocaine going on in Europe and experimented first on a dog, then successfully on a patient in the world's first use of spinal anesthesia. This was absolutely revolutionary and a huge success.
The following year, he published Local Anesthesia in General Medicine and Surgery, the first textbook of it's kind. He didn't know a whole lot about the spine, so it was kind of a guessing and it wasn't, it wasn't, I mean, it was an educated guess, but it wasn't precision.
Moxie: Right.
Emily: Which leads us to 1891, when the lumbar puncture technique was developed. This allowed for a more accurate application of cocaine in spinal anesthesia, and in 1898, this led to Dr. August Bier adopting the method. The next year he performed six unproblematic orthopedic operations, and he wrote about it in a paper entitled, "Experiments with Cocainization of the Spinal Cord".
At this point, the use of cocaine as an anesthetic took off. However, doctors had no idea what the fuck they were doing and kept killing patients with overdoses, like straight up. Once the connection was made, the medical field backed off from using cocaine. Cocaine addiction, however, boomed.
It was extremely easy to get. People could go buy it from their local chemist or even street vendors. The vast changes that the world experienced in that time period are also credited for the rise in people turning to the drug to cope. It's almost like trauma is a gateway to drug addiction or something.
Moxie: Right. Who would have thought?
Emily: Just going back to asylums and bullshit care for those with mental health needs. In 1905, Dr. Alfred Einhorn synthesized what he called "procaine". Fucking love that, procaine. Coupled with Heinrich Braun's combination of pro crane... pro caine.
You know what? Say that 10 times fast it's not as easy as you thought.
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: Anyhow, Heinrich Braun combined the procaine with adrenaline and it made the effects last longer. This innovation fulfilled the purpose of cocaine while being much safer for patients. Procaine made the use of cocaine in anesthesia virtually obsolete. Not completely obsolete, they still use it to this day for certain things. Like my sister had a nasal surgery and she was surprised to find on her invoice that cocaine had been used in the surgery.
Cause it's, it works as a local anesthetic.
Around 1930, people started to understand more just how dangerous cocaine is and the popular drugs switched to being amphetamines. It wouldn't be until the Misuse of Drugs Act in 1971, that cocaine would be categorized as a class A substance and become illegal. That was in the US I believe, because the US and the UK had different years.
Now we're going to turn it over to Moxie, and then we're going to circle back around to Freud.
Moxie: All right. I am going to be talking about some of the more recent developments in anesthesiology, of which I was able to find a lot less then my portion of the last time and that's dumb because we should have a lot more information on more modern uses of anesthesiology.
But what are you going to do?
In 1941, Dr. Robert Hingson developed what was called the Continuous Caudal Anesthesia, which was a way of having continuous pain relief for prolonged and difficult labor.
In 1942, they started using the muscle relaxant Cure-ra-ray or Cure-ur-rawr (Curare). I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
In 1944, Sweden started introducing lidocaine, which is a topical ointment that numbs.
Emily: It can also be injected.
Moxie: Is it? Yeah.
Emily: Yeah. I've had it injected several times. It's, it's not pleasant. It stings like a bitch, but then things go numb.
Moxie: Right.
I found it quite effective when it's been applied topically.
In 1956, halothane was the first modern day brominated general anesthetic to be used. And then in 1960, we started using methoxyflurane, which I believe would have been a type of medicine that you inhale for anesthesiology. In 1964, they started using injections of ketamine.
In 1966. They started using enflurane as an inhalable anesthetic. In 1972, they started using isoflurane as an inhalable anesthetic. Then in 1992, desflurane as an inhalable anesthetic, and in 1994, sevoflurane as an inhalable anesthetic.
And that's basically all the information I could find. Like I said, it was not nearly like it was last time. It was just. What they had a lot of information on was different, like, different groups that have been created to kind of test and regulate different anesthetics. How we would test them, how they would be used, how much of them would be used. That sort of thing. Just a lot of different groups in the medical field that were testing on those things.
There's a lot of information about those, but that's not what we're talking about today. So I didn't write those down.
Emily: Yeah. I recently learned about, you'd mentioned ketamine and it reminded me that it's being used in a depression treatment, for like, treatment resistant depression. Because of it's like small psychoactive effects.
Moxie: I've heard of that too. I don't know how effective it is, but I have heard of that.
Emily: Back to Freud, he was about 28-years-old when he became interested in cocaine. There are a couple of different stories as to how he became interested in cocaine, why he started experimenting with it, whether it was sanctioned, unsanctioned, whether he had sponsorship to experiment with it or not.
I just went with what history.com said, because they're a more reliable resource. They said he'd become interested in it after learning about this drug that German military doctors were using to rejuvenate exhausted soldiers.
Moxie: They were giving exhausted soldiers, cocaine?
Emily: Umhum.
Moxie: Yeah. We would do that. Wouldn't we?
Emily: Germany did it.
Moxie: Oh, Germany, Germany. They would do that to.
Emily: Germany a little bit pre-WWI. Now I'm so interested to know if they were taking cocaine during WWI, cuz it wasn't till 1930 that people really shut it down. *gasp* I wonder! Everyone in Europe was hopped up on cocaine when that fucking war went down. So many more things about the world makes sense. I wonder.
The first way that Freud experimented with the cocaine was that he dissolved it into water and drank it. He noted that it made him feel good. He said it eased indigestion, improved mood and gave him energy. He wrote to his fiance, that cocaine "swelled him into a stud".
Now, when I was reading this article, it was, it was kind of choppily written so that it read, I straight up read across "swelled him to a stud, sent her vials". And my brain did not go, "Oh yeah, he was sending her vials of cocaine". No, it went, "He sent her vials of his studhood? He sent it to her.
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: And you know what? Honestly, it's not like it's unheard of.
Moxie: Right.
Emily: Only differences would not have been frigerated by then. So it would have been, like, spoiled seaman vials.
Moxie: Gross.
Emily: Yeah. "Snort these up your nose. It'll cure your stomach ache."
Moxie: Very vile vial.
Emily: * laughing* It's the vile vial.
Freud started giving cocaine to everybody. Dominic Streatfeild, author of Cocaine an Unauthorized Biography, said, "If there is one person who can be held responsible for the emergence of cocaine as a recreational pharmaceutical, it was Freud."
Freud thought cocaine was so awesome that in 1884, he wrote the paper "Über Coca" which he called, "a song of praise to this magical sustenance" substance, not sustenance. Although, the way he was pounding it, it might as well had been a sustenance.
At this time, Freud thought cocaine wasn't addictive at all. Rather he wrote, "it seems to me noteworthy-- and I discovered this myself in other observers who were capable of judging such things-- that the first dose or even repeated doses of coca produce no compulsive desire to use the stimulant further; on the contrary, one feels a certain unmotivated aversion to the substance."
What's an unmotivated aversion?
Moxie: Right?
Emily: Is that the same thing as, as an addiction? Because I feel like it's the same thing as an addiction.
Moxie: But yeah, that's totally not how it works because you know, that's what they say about cocaine is that it makes you just keep wanting to do cocaine over and over.
Emily: Yeah, one of the articles I was reading and I will cite the, our sources in the show notes, they were saying, "well, he probably thought it wasn't addictive because he never had to deal with running out of it," taking it all the time and never experienced withdrawals.
Now I actually did go and read this "Über Coca," and it took me a minute to find a transcript of it, but I was able to. He wrote in this, "On the whole, the toxic effects of coca are of short duration and much less intense than those produced by effective doses of quinine or salicylate of soda" I do not know what salicylate of soda is. Sorry. If anybody knows. Email us historyandshit@gmail.com
" They seem to become even weaker after repeated use of cocaine." Almost like the body is building up a tolerance or something. Wow. I like read that. I didn't put the fucking quotation marks at the end of it. So it sounded like he was saying very academically, "Almost, it's like the body is building up a tolerance or something". All sarcasm intended.
It legit says, "all sarcasm intended" in my notes. It's there. Yes. That is something very, very scholarly. He would be saying. No! That's me being facetious. What? The effects become weaker, the more you take it? Do you mean that, that your body, it, it builds up a tolerance and is going to need fucking more?!
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: It's really funny. Cause he was, he also talked about a couple of times. He's like, "oh yeah, you start going and you'll dip. But if you take more, you're fine. You go right back to being okay, but it's not addictive."
Moxie: No.
Emily: No.
Moxie: Definitely
Emily: You just need, you just need to keep taking it in order to feel the good feels.
Furthermore, he wrote, "The psychic effect of (this is the scientific name and I'm going to butcher it) cocaine'm mir, mir carts com, Marotta com? (cocai'num muriaticum) In doses of 0.5..."
0.5? Oh, I think that's 0.5 milligrams is what that's supposed to be. Or it could be 0.5 micrograms. I don't fucking know. "... log consists of exhilaration and lasting euphoria, which does not differ in any way from the normal euphoria of a healthy person". How much euphoria does a healthy person have? I want to know, because I don't understand this, at all.
Moxie: Not cocaine levels.
Do, I don't know, do do, do "healthy" people, healthy was in quotation marks there. Do healthy people just walk around, feeling euphoric all of the time? It, don't...
I don't know.
What I know of psychology, you're not supposed to feel that way because you're unbalanced. I think it's called being manic.
I don't know, especially in the 1880s. In 1880s what the fuck did they have to be euphoric about?
There's a reason people were taking all of these drugs! It was a horrible time to be alive.
Unless, I don't know. The only redeeming quality was that you could go and get cocaine from a street vendor.
I was about to say *laughs*.
Emily: My life is euphoric because I can get hardcore drugs anytime!
The feeling of excitement, which accomp-". Oh, okay. I'm back to quoting his bullshit. "The feeling of excitement, which accompanies stimulus by alcohol..." I'm sorry. Who gets stimulated by alcohol?
Moxie: It's not a stimulant.
Emily: No. Speaking as someone who has been sober for 10 years, so I drank a lot of alcohol people, it's not a stimulant. It makes you so weird.
And I don't know, cause I guess there's a point when some people are like "fun drunk", but that's not really stimulating. Because it's not like you're a controlled "fun drunk". You're disor-, you're, what's the word I'm looking for? Disorganized is not the one I'm looking for. Discoordinated!
You're discoordinated. And you might take your top off and that's like the best stimulus alcohol is going to give you. And in five minutes, you're going to be waking up naked in a bathtub wondering what happened last night. I don't call that stimulus, but whatever. "...it was lacking, the stimulus of alcohol." Can we just, I mean, I'm going to assume that most people have the basic knowledge of how cocaine works and what it does.
Moxie: I would think so.
Emily: Like, one of the reasons it was popular among housewives and stuff was because it gave you the energy. But, apparently, according to Freud, it is not as stimulating as alcohol.
Whatever. Okay. Back to his stupid quote about it lacking the stimulus of alcohol. 🎵Do-dah-do🎵. He says, "the characteristic..."
Moxie: I mean, I think it's not as inebriating.
Emily: Maybe, maybe that's what he meant.
Moxie: Maybe that's what he meant, but that's not what he said.
Emily: No, he said "stimulus".
Moxie: And that I don't understand.
Emily: You're supposed to be a fucking doctor Freud! I say doctor very loosely.
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: "... the characteristic urge for immediate activity, which alcohol produces is also absent." So I guess by "stimulus", he's saying you're not going to dance on the table and throw your bra at the audience. And by audience, we mean the one bartender who is so sick of your shit and your friend, who's your ride home and is also equally sick of your shit.
And don't tell me that only women wear bras. I don't care. I see you with your moobs. You're wearing a bra.
Wow. I keep getting way off track on this.
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: Okay. Sorry. "One senses an increase of self-control and feels more vigorous and more capable of work," he went on.
I mean, it makes sense with what you said. If he'd used inebriated, that would have made more sense, but he's like "snort this shit and you will have your life together".
Moxie: No, no.
Emily: No.
Moxie: No, you won't.
Emily: Freud theorized that the feelings of euphoria weren't from the addition of cocaine into your system; rather, they came from," the disappearance of elements in one's general state of wellbeing, which caused depression". Saying that, "One may perhaps assume that the euphoria resulting from good health is also nothing more than the normal condition of a well-nourished cerebral cortex".
Eat your cocaine! Nourish your cerebral cortex! Except for don't, actually. That is not, that's not actual advice. Don't come at me.
Moxie: Don't do that.
Emily: You develop a cocaine addiction, that's your own stupid. We've talked about this enough. I hate that I have to put a warning on that. You're like, don't come at me. You chose to eat cocaine.
Fred introduced cocaine to Ernst... ah, what is with these names? I do not usually have this much problem pronouncing German names, names around that region, but this one's trying me. Let's try this Fly- shul Maher, Murrah, Marxel? How do you pronounce X O W?
Is it like Mark-so?
Moxie: I think so.
Emily: Okay. Maybe that's it. You know what I'm going to do? Because I was nice enough to do it for the other peoples' whose name I couldn't say. We'll just shove it in the pronunciation guide.
Online Pronoucer: Fleischl-Marxow.
Emily: Freud introduced cocaine to Ernst, who was a physiologist friend.
Moxie: Okay.
Emily: As the way to wean him off of his morphine addiction. This was also something we thought about like, "cocaine will wean you off of morphine and alcohol. This is going to cure you."
The way I said, cure almost sounded like kill, and I'm going to roll with it. This is the day of rolling with it people.
Instead, Ernst developed a hard core cocaine addiction. He was spending 6,000 marks per month, which is roughly $103,000 USD today. If I'm wrong on that math please correct me. I did my best with the conversions and the inflation calculator, even if it was just like 6,000 marks a month, even if that was just still today, $6,000 a month.
Moxie: That's a lot.
Emily: That's a lot. And roughly, we're talking about equaling today, $1,000 or $103,000 a month. How? I don't understand how you can feed a cocaine addiction like that. But yeah, he was spending that much money on cocaine and he died only seven years after becoming addicted at the age of 45.
Moxie: Wow.
Emily: Yep.
This was an "oh shit" moment.
I just see Freud and some of his colleagues sitting around smoking cigars with scantily clad women hanging off of them going, "Oh shit!"
Stop giving those girls cocaine! It's not going to fix their vaginas! I swear. There's a reason I keep saying this, that we're getting there, we're getting there.
As more information came out about how cocaine was actually extremely addictive and just how badly it fucked up a body Freud stopped advocating for the use of cocaine, but he still used it intermittently for migraines, nasal inflammation and depression until the mid 1890s. And he was addicted to that shit. BUT there's more.
We're backtracking. Because before that we have cocaine being used to treat female hysteria. Because why not? After all, everything wrong with a woman came from her vagina. What part of the body,
Moxie: Oh.
Emily: Do you think you can treat the va-jay-jay through?
Moxie: The nose!
Emily: I wish we were joking, but these were the 1800s and, honestly, we really haven't evolved much from then when it comes to vagina haver's healthcare.
Dr. Wilhelm Fließ, German... okay, I looked up how to say this, otolaryngologist- which is an ear nose and throat specialist - speculated that the nose was a microcosm of the body. I had to look up what that meant and Google says it's a, "community, a place or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger". Fließ thought that any ailments of the body could be treated by finding its corresponding location in the nose.
So snort up that cocaine, because it's going to cure your lady bits.
At least this was the idea behind Fließ's paper, "The Relation Between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs". Fließ was so convinced that there was a connection between the nose and genitals that he even invented a surgery to sever the connection, and Freud backed him.
They were buddies. So we're going to talk about, we're going to kind of bounce between two articles now about exactly how bad this went down.
Fließ was an all around... Everything, everything in his career is bylined by, "which is not accepted as scientific", "which is not accepted in medicine today", "which would get him imprisoned", "his medical license", like everything. But Freud I liked him. Freud was eating up this thing and we know how Freud felt about everything coming back to sex.
Moxie: Right.
Emily: That was a thing. If you don't know about that, maybe we'll do another thing about that. That was Freud's thing. So of course, you know, of course you can fix vaginas through the nose. That makes so much sense. Right?
They got together there, they became buddy's.
Fließ played an important role in helping Freud develop his theory of psychoanalysis, which is a, "set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal with the part of the unconscious mind and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders". That's from Wikipedia.
Also known as bullshit, and that's according to modern science. So I can say that.
After Freud formed this friendship and he totally believed Fließ's theory about the nose being connected to the genitalia and how that caused mental health problems; because Freud was already all on about, one of his big things that he kept going back to in his field of study was that all of his patients had depression, hysteria, basically anything on the spectrum of mental health disorders was all caused from inappropriate sexual experiences they'd had in their infancy or in their toddler years.
Moxie: Okay.
Emily: So of course it makes sense that everything mentally wrong comes from your genitals.
Moxie: Right?
Emily: I mean, whatever, whatever.
And because he himself was a mess, he allowed Fließ to repeatedly operate on his nose and sinuses to cure his neurosis. Yep.
Side note, they experimented with anesthetization of the nasal mucosa with cocaine, which we talked about a second ago with my sister. They used it as a topical. I guess they told her it also helps control bleeding, which I didn't know. And I didn't see it in this, so that was something interesting to know.
Together, Fließ and Freud developed a project for scientific psychology, which was later abandoned.
During this time, Emma Eckstein had a particularly disastrous experience. She was 27 and Freud referred her to Fließ for surgery to remove the turbinate bone from her nose in order to cure her premenstrual depression.
I'm not sure if it was just regular PMS, because again, this is the late 1800s. They didn't know a damn thing, and all women were hysterical. Or if she had PMDD, which is more intense than becomes problematic and does require proper treatment proper.
Moxie: Your nose is not proper treatment.
Emily: Yep. Nope. Don't don't have plastic surgery to cure your PMS people.
Eckstein hemorrhaged profusely in the weeks following the procedure. To the point that it almost killed her and infection set in. Freud consulted another surgeon about this and, oh my gosh.
Oh my gosh! You want to know why?
Moxie: Why?
Emily: Of the 5 million things that went wrong? Fließ had left a piece of surgical gauze up her nose.
Moxie: Oh no.
Emily: Eckstein was left permanently disfigured with the left side of her face caved in.
Moxie: Ugh, and still bad PMS, I'm sure, because it wouldn't have done anything.
Emily: But it's totally okay, because she became *laughs* a psychoanalyst. She became a psychoanalyst herself because Freud was still her buddy.
There are mental images. I just, I should not make fun of this. I should not make fun of this woman. What happened to her was terrible, but I am just imagining this really...
I imagine this very stout, Viennese woman with half a face, running down the hall on a terrible PMS trip, yelling at her patient.
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: I know I shouldn't make fun of her, but come on. It's right there!
" Get back here! We need to talk about your penis!"
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: " It's located in your nose!"
Fließ became paranoid in his later life. That's awesome. Apparently, and I'm not really sure where this came in because Fließ is Fließ and he is a Fließ. He started using mathematic calculations to tell fortunes, I guess.
Moxie: Oh.
Emily: He predicted Freud's death would be around age 51 through a complicated bio-numerical theory. That's the "critical period calculations".
In 1904, their friendship disintegrated due to Fließ's belief that Freud had given details of a periodicity theory Fließ was developing to a plagiarist.
Moxie: Oh no.
Emily: Look, my ability to tell the future from the nose bones I removed from your face so that your crotch will stop giving you shit is not to be shared with plagiarists! You are no longer my friend!
Moxie: *laughs*
Emily: Wow, I love this. Freud was so heavily, like, "fuck this guy!" that he destroyed all of his correspondences with Fließ. Oh, they were saved by Marie Bonaparte. She purchased the letters.
Moxie: Wow.
Emily: And refuse to permit their destruction.
But wait, there's more, because now we have to talk about cocaine and psychoanalysis.
We're going to backtrack to Eckstein losing half of her face because, you would think at that point they'd be like," yeah, this whole sexual organs and messing with different parts of the body and your crotch being the cause of all of your psychological issues", might be even just a little bit pinned down.
Moxie: Mm-hmm.
Emily: "No, we're going to set that aside", but it didn't. Cause we know that she became a psychoanalyst and Freud kept going, and he kept using these ideas of the connections between the body and the mental stuff to develop this theory of psychoanalysis. Now, I am not saying that your body and your mind aren't connected and they don't affect each other.
It's, I mean, it's pretty obvious. Everybody can tell. You're sick, you get grumpy, whatever. I'm saying the way that he went about it was very, very weird, and not scientific, and made basically no sense. Basically, he was getting his patients high on cocaine and being like," let's explore your everything".
And he kept pedaling this cocaine to like the socialites and the bourgeoisie.
Like, "this is going to, you are going to make all of these breakthroughs about your psychological problems while you're high".
Now, if anybody has ever had the 'joy' of listening to somebody when they are high or super drunk or whatever. You know? You ever taken your friend in for surgery, met them on the way out when they're still pumped up on drugs, or if you've ever listened to anybody who has had nitrous oxide for their teeth.
Our niece might kill us but, " I don't want to be a chipmunk!" Said through very, very teary eyes is not a psychological breakthrough.
Moxie: Right.
Emily: It's not. But he went at it and this is where a lot of his dream interpretation stuff came from, because,
