The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [53]
America turned away from bleeding and toward drugs in response to the medical treatment of George Washington in 1799. Washington was ailing, and his doctors bled him. Four times. He got weaker and weaker, and he died. Today’s physicians studying the case agree that those bleedings killed Washington, and people at the time thought so, too. It wasn’t as if this was the first time someone had died from a bleeding, but this was George Washington. As with Rock Hudson’s revelation of his having AIDS, when a larger-than-life figure experiences something, it can affect us in a larger-than-life way. People did not want to be bled to death, so they stopped going to regular doctors. Also, as Americans, it flattered our sense of independence to be able to reject the old European bleeding techniques and offer some homegrown American cures. America rejected established medicine in favor of the idea of allowing the body to heal itself, assisted by drugs, spa treatments, and special diets. Morphine use rose, and had a less alarming fatality rate than the bleeding that had preceded it.
Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was perhaps the first tell-all of its type: the man needed money, didn’t mind attention, and sold his story. He had had facial neuralgia at about nineteen years of age and was given opium for it, and liked it; he said he spent one night a week on laudanum at a concert or opera. He felt troubled or anxious a lot, and distraught about his scolding mother, so he took the drug to feel good. He also reported private drug experiences that were sometimes happy, sometimes ecstatic, and sometimes bad or even horrible—sometimes all at once: “I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed.”15 Despite his ambivalence, for over a century this book was credited with drawing people to opium. They wanted the heightened experience, and the comfort. Elizabeth Barrett Browning recorded her experience with drugs: “Opium—opium—night after night! & some nights, during east winds, even opium won’t do.”16 It’s a droll line. Samuel Taylor Coleridge credited his marvelous poem “Kubla Khan” to a morphine dream. His daughter, Sara, wrote more directly to the drug. Consider a poem she wrote called “Poppies,” which speaks for itself. Here are most of its stanzas. (Note: Cramoisy is an old term for crimson cloth. Herbert is her young son.)
The Poppies blooming all around
My Herbert loves to see,
Some pearly white, some dark as night,
Some red as cramoisy;
He loves their colors fresh and fine
As fair as fair can be,
But little does my darling know
How good they are to me.
O how should thou with beaming brow
With eye and cheek so bright
Know ought of that blossom’s power,
Or sorrows of the night!
Oh then my sweet, my happy boy,
Will thank the poppy flower,
Which brings the sleep to dear ma-ma
At midnight’s darksome hour.17
Sara had had some hard times. As Virginia Woolf put it in a biography of Sara, “Children were born and children died,” some very young. Sara herself died of breast cancer at forty-eight. Herbert Coleridge, for his part, was considered a genius in his time. As a young philologist, he set the foundation for what became the Oxford English Dictionary. Herbert hadn’t much time to see it grow, though: he was dead of tuberculosis at thirty-one. It was 1861. For those in pain, the idea that relief is only one sip or one needle prick away is perhaps a little dreadful, but mostly wonderful. One had friends who did it, too, and one had heard of people who had lived to old age, sipping and pricking all the while. And who could deny the wishes of a woman or a man who had made so many trips to the graveyard?
Drugs were respectable and publicly relied upon in ways that would shock people today, and opiates