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DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,

For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,

Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,

Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.

Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,

And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,

And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

What he says here is: Death, you think you are so powerful, but the people you think you kill don’t actually die, and you cannot kill me, either. Death, you think you are so great at putting people to sleep, but poppies and other potions make us sleep, too, “and better than thy stroake.” Death is in part vanquished because of the goodness of poppies in comparison. We think more along the lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet on love that says “Love’s not Time’s fool,” and we sort of pretend that is what Donne is saying—that love and life transcend death—but Donne isn’t. Donne is saying something about sleep, and poppy trips, and the pleasure of being finished.

It often sounds as if historical personages were using drugs in ways quite similar to the ways moderns use them. Still, the reality must be something wholly other; not like us, but also not like the magically drug-free thousand years that we usually imagine. States of mind were imagined differently; medieval culture had its own imagery of health and disease, religious “conditions” both blessed and damned, varieties of madness, and levels of village idiocy. What we would consider “drug use” was mixed into these in ample supply. Especially with addictive substances, it is easy to mistake withdrawal reactions for symptoms of a disease, and the drug as a restorative.7 Past historical eras left records of diseases that we do not have today, and some of these were deemed responsive to opium. Some of them may have been opium withdrawal. Similarly, the Victorian age set up a gender division that was too extreme for many people, and illness was a refuge into which patients could flee—and to which doctors could resort for an explanation of problematic feelings and behavior. Women were often diagnosed as hysterical if they were sexual, energetic, garrulous, loud, or boldly emotional; in acute cases, there were paralyzed limbs or blindness. Nervous exhaustion, often called neurasthenia, was often diagnosed in men who were tired, emotionally sensitive, and subject to the occasional collapse. Illness is rarely flattering, but if the status quo was impossible for someone, the choice got made. It is never fun when you are considered sick and people can boss you around, but one perquisite for going this way was (and is) the drugs. Consider, too, that the diagnosis of nervous exhaustion was well positioned to be a cover for, or an interpretation of, a man whose maintenance dose of some drug had gotten out of hand. Some theorists such as the French philosopher Théodule Ribot, considered drug addiction to be essentially the same thing as nervous illness.8 In an age of “Man for the sword and for the needle she,” as Tennyson put it, hysteria was the label for a loud girl who had a metaphorical sword and wouldn’t quietly sew. I am proposing that nervous disease was sometimes the diagnosis for a man with a needle. Of the hypodermic variety.

I will offer a last thought on the general question of what makes a good drug bad. The Mormon Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was formed in 1830 (Joseph Smith had his first vision a decade earlier), and part of the doctrine was to abstain from alcohol, coffee, and tea. These avoidances were not mandatory for members until the twentieth century; indeed, it wasn’t even until