The Hasheesh Eater by Fitz Hugh Ludlow
Appendix.
The work referred to is a monograph upon
Trance and human Hybernation,
by Dr. James Braid, of Edinburgh, and published
by John Church, Princes Street, Soho, London. Besides the copy now in my
hands, through the kindness of my friend Dr.
Rosa, of Watertown, I have never seen any other, although it probably
exists in medical libraries in this country. Aware, at any rate, that the
book is inaccessible, except by considerable painstaking, to general
readers, I will state the authority upon which the phenomenon of the
fakeer’s interment and trance is related, in order that it may rest upon a
stronger basis of proof than the testimony of an exceedingly credulous and
superstitious people like the natives of Lahore.
Sir Claude Wade, formerly of her majesty’s service, and, at the date of
Dr. Braid’s writing, residing in Ryde, on the
Isle of Wight, assures the doctor by letter that he was present at Lahore
during the period of the fakeer’s inhumation, and witnessed his
disinterment. By this gentleman, Sir C. E. Tervelyan, and Captain Osborne,
all that is stated of the fakeer by Dr. Braid
is authenticated, and, indeed, through them did the doctor obtain the
materials for his narrative.
By as strong a conjunction of testimony, therefore, as could be desired for
the proof of the most startling assertion, is this recital put beyond the
possibility of being an imposture.
Among a number of articles written at various times by this author upon the
subject of the narcotic fascinations, is one, published some time ago over
his own signature in the New York Tribune, relative to the employment of
hasheesh in India both as a gratification and a remedy. My knowledge of
his thorough acquaintance with the habits of the ultra Oriental people,
among whom he so long dwelt, together with a number of astonishing cures of
the opium bane which he effected when, as I have said, all hope of
restoration seemed forever gone, makes me particularly desirous to give the
article of which I speak in full, as supplementary, through its specific
value, to that which I have written of my own experience of hasheesh.
Except as an antispasmodic in a very limited number of diseases, the
Cannabis is known and prized very little among our practitioners, and I am
persuaded that its uses are far wider and more important than has yet been
imagined.
Urged by this conviction, I have therefore transcribed the article of
Dr. Palmer, and offer it here to the thoughtful
attention which it deserves from all, whether professional or lay, who wish
to add a most beneficial agent to their pharmacopœia. It is
entitled
HASHEESH IN HYDROPHOBIA.
To the Editor of the New York Tribune:
Sir, — In your journal of Friday last appeared a timely paper on
hydrophobia, from Dr. Griscom, of the New
York Hospital, being a report of the interesting case of Edward
Bransfield, with the inevitably fatal termination. Allow me to add to
the communication of Dr. Griscom another on
the same subject, which may be deemed important. It is the result of
medical observation in the East on the use and effects of hasheesh
(Cannabis Indica). In thus writing for the public I shall avoid
technicalities.
The Radda and Coolee bazars of the
Black Town of Calcutta
are the Borroboola-Ghas
of heathendom — the back slums of Budhism — where the most abject of
helots and a very
Herod among cruel heathen
are presented in the same person — whither the flannel shirts and
small-tooth combs of the
Rev.
Aminadab Sleek are sent every Friday night from Burton’s Theatre, but
never reach. It is there you must go to procure your hasheesh fresh from
the fields, and see your living subject try experiments on himself. If
you have a lively case of Rabies in your compound, and carry a copy of
Monte Christo*
in your pocket, so much the better — you are posted in the phenomena.
You will find dirty, dreadful-looking shops, redolent of petroleum and the
hubble-bubble,†
and prolific in Pariah
dogs, ochre-colored urchins (which, as they flounder about on their
bellies, always a shade or two lighter than the rest, oddly resemble
young crocodiles), and every other living thing which should make those
small-tooth combs lively in the market. And, amid these essentially
Oriental surroundings, you will find a fat old gentleman, with the least
possible clothing, to compromise between decency and the climate, who is
either galvanic like Uriah
Heep, or asleep like the
Fat Boy, as you happen to catch him just before or after his pipe,
and who is licensed to dispense to the denizens of that quarter
churrus, gunjah, and bhang,
in the name of Lord
Dalhousie, the most noble the Governor General in Council.
At the season of flowering, a resinous substance exudes and concretes on
the slender stalks, leaves, and tops of the hemp plant in India, a sticky
gum which causes the young stems to adhere together tenaciously in the
bundles of gunjah. Men, now dressed all in leather, are sent into the
fields to run to and fro, sweeping the plants with their garments, from
which afterward they diligently gather the resin that has adhered. This
is the churrus, wherein is all the narcotic virtue of the herb, all the
seventh heaven of hasheesh intoxication for the Hindoo and the Arab. The
most potent of it comes from Nepaul. Bhang, or subjee, is the larger
leaves and capsules of the Cannabis compressed in balls and sticky
layers, with here and there some flowers between. Infused with water, it
forms an intoxicating brew, to which, however, the Hindoos are not
commonly addicted. Gunjah, mixed with tobacco and smoked in a pipe, is
the shape of the drug which they popularly affect, and it is as gunjah
that it is commonly sold in the shops. This comes in bundles,
twenty-four of the plants entire, stalks, leaves, capsules, and tops
undisturbed, and from which their resin has not been separated, adhering
tenaciously. Gunjah, indeed, is the term proper to Hindostan, hasheesh
being Arabic, and used to denote the tops and tenderest parts of the
plant, sun-dried and powdered.
Romantic extravagances have been written and told about the magic and the
marvels of hasheesh, and Indian
Coleridges
and
De Quinceys
have been pressed into service to furnish forth characteristic stories
for Oriental annuals and spectacles of the Monte Christo kind. These are
for the most part fictitious, though, to be sure, your
kidmudgar,
if he happens to be a
gunjah-wallah,
is apt at times to indulge in splendid fancies, to make you a
grand salaam
instead of a sandwich, and offer you a
houri
when you merely demanded a red herring. But
Dr. O’Shaugnessy,
the present distinguished superintendent of the Indian telegraph, who
formerly administered a model system of discipline among the native
hospitals, and from his Eastern look-out has added here and there a new
light to the firmament of science, who was the first to pursue this
subject with well-directed researches, and procure from it definite
results, describes the uniform effect of this agent on the human economy
as consisting in a prompt and complete alleviation of pain; a singular
power of controlling inordinate muscular spasms, especially in
hydrophobia and traumatic tetanus; “as a soporific or hypnotic in
conciliating sleep;” inordinate augmentation of appetite; the decided
promotion of aphrodisiac desire; and sudden cerebral exaltation, with
perfect mental cheerfulness, is in no case followed by the painful
nervous “unstringing,” the constipation and suppression of secretions
which attend the use of opium.
Having daily under his eyes, in the streets of Calcutta, examples of this
marvelous power of the gunjah, Dr.
O’Shaughnessy proceeded, in a
succession of judicious experiments, to apply it in several diseases
attended with much muscular convulsion. Its action he discovered to be
primarily on the motor nerves, promptly inducing complete loss of power
in almost all the muscles; hence its timeliness in the spasms of tetanus,
in the cramp of Asiatic cholera, in the sharp constriction of the muscles
of deglutition
in hydrophobia. In tetanus especially he met with signal
success, even in his earliest experiments perfectly restoring ten cases
in fourteen, and since then, to my personal knowledge, a still larger
proportion. In the summer of 1852 it was administered with convincing
success in cases of Asiatic cholera among the Company’s troops in Burmah,
even in the collapsed stage, subduing cramp and restoring warmth to the
surface. Under its influence alone, that peculiar blueness and
shriveling of the nails and fingers, familiarly known as “washerwoman’s
hands,” has been rapidly dispersed, the flesh plumping out rosily again,
like a decayed apple under an air-pump.
Every intelligent physician will perceive that there is nothing in the
kind of virtue manifested in these cases which has not a direct bearing,
and by the same modus operandi, on the phenomena
of hydrophobia, since it has been ably contended, especially in India,
that the three diseases are of a kindred type; that their phenomena are
purely nervous and functional, and that no local inflammations are
necessary to their definition.
In an occasional contribution to the British and Foreign Medical Review,
and in some excellent monographs published in Calcutta,
Dr. O’Shaughnessy
has given the results of his experiments since 1850, by which it appears
that in almost every case, with the Cannabis alone, he has succeeded in
procuring perfect alleviation of pain, complete control of the spasm, and
its attendant apprehension and infernal imagination — indeed, an utter
routing of all the horrors of the disease; and claiming, with a saving
clause, one or two cures, he makes it evident that in every instance a
painless, tranquil, conscious termination is attainable. His patients
have swallowed water with avidity, paddled in it and made merry with it,
and been friendly with it to the end.
That it has thus overcome the horrors of Rabies and all the dreadfulness
of such a death-bed, should procure for the Cannabis more consideration
than it has met with at the hands of the profession in this country. The
objection, hitherto valid, that its preparations are of unequal strength,
and that the drug loses all its virtues by change of climate, is
conclusively met and defeated at last by the admirable alcoholic extract
of Mr. Robinson. The writer of this has seen
a sepoy of the 40th Rifles,
an hour before furiously hydrophobic, under the influence of the Cannabis
not only drinking water freely, but pleasantly washing his face and
hands.
In conclusion, I would invoke for the Cannabis Indica the interest of
American writers and practitioners by research and experiment.
* * * * * * * * *
J. W. Palmer, M.D.
THE END.
- * For the
benefit of those who have not read this novel of Dumas, let me say that in
it quite a lively hasheesh vision is recorded.
- †
Indice for water-pipe.
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