Patent Medicines and the History of Cocaine

– by Charlie Dawson, Visitor Services/Gallery Associate

From the waning days of the golden age of patent medicine comes this advertisement for pharmaceutical cocaine. The ad was produced by CF Boehringer and Soehne, founded in 1885 Mannheim, Germany, but which soon expanded into New York. By the time of this ad’s publication in 1897, cocaine was available in New York only by prescription.  

Accordingly, the ad includes a long list of physicians and pharmacists who approve of its use. At the top of the list stands Carl Koller, the first person to use cocaine as a surgical anesthetic, which he did as a twenty-seven-year-old unpaid intern. 

In 1884, Koller and a colleague anesthetized their eyeballs with a cocaine solution and took turns poking themselves in the cornea with a pin. Although many had noted cocaine’s pain-killing properties, it was Koller who pioneered its use as the world’s first local anesthetic. 

Heretofore, surgeons had recourse only to general anesthesia like chloroform and ether. Both could be fatal, and both could cause vomiting and retching – highly disruptive side effects during surgery. Roberts Bartholow wrote in 1891: 

“No remedy in modern times – probably in any age of the world – has become so famous in so short a time as cocaine, and no remedy has so soon been subjected to the tests of physiological experiment and clinical observation.” 

It quickly moved into other medical fields. George Miller Beard had only recently developed the concept of neurasthenia, which was seen as a byproduct of the increasingly rigid scheduling of the Machine Age. Here, cocaine’s ability to stave off the body’s signaling of hunger and fatigue proved indispensable. 

Of course, South American native peoples had been chewing coca leaves for millennia, prizing it for its ability to stave off fatigue and hunger. As a testament to its importance, consider that the Inca gave the prefix Mama to only three life-sustaining substances: coca, cinchona (source of quinine) and maize. 

In the early 19th century, scientists began isolating active ingredients from plant and animal products: morphine in 1803, quinine and caffeine in 1820, nicotine in 1828. In 1859, PhD student Albert Niemann isolated the active ingredient in coca leaves and unleashed cocaine on a ready world. 

That same year, Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza wrote a paper extolling the use of coca leaves to treat symptoms as varied as furred tongue, flatulence, and in the whitening of teeth. Like many practitioners of the era, Mantegazza’s first test subject was himself. At one point, he took too much and wrote in his diary: 

“God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effects of coca all lifelong. I would rather live a life of ten with coca than one of 100,000 without it.” 

One person who read Mantegazza’s paper was the enterprising Corsican chemist Angelo Mariani. He mixed coca leaves with wine to produce Vin Mariani. A marketing pioneer, Mariani sent samples to celebrities throughout Europe and the United States and received glowing testimonials from Thomas Edison, Rodin, Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Pope Leo XIII. 

Imitators quickly sprang up. While Vin Mariani mixed alcohol with coca leaves, others made use of the recently isolated, and far more powerful, cocaine. 

In Atlanta, pharmacist John Pemberton modified Mariani’s formula to produce “French Wine Cola,” which evolved into Coca Cola. Pemberton was also a former Confederate soldier and current morphine addict. Morphine addiction was widespread among veterans, and physicians hailed cocaine as a cure for addiction. 

Both coca and cocaine dry sinuses and open breathing passages, which made it attractive for the treatment of allergies, asthma, and catarrh – excessive mucus. It was also used for its palliative, rather than curative effects. Ulysses Grant, dying of throat cancer, credited cocaine with giving him the strength to write his well-regarded memoirs during his final months of life. 

A young Sigmund Freud became an enthusiast, sending cocaine samples to friends, his sisters, and his fiancée. Freud would take cocaine before going to parties to make himself more talkative, speeding past medicinal use and into the purely recreational. 

Even as cocaine made its victory lap, backlash was brewing. Reports came of patients experiencing blackouts and convulsions. Freud’s colleague Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow reported a sensation of bugs and snakes crawling beneath his skin. In the end, he decided morphine addiction was preferable. 

As part of its marketing efforts, CF Boehringer distributed glass paperweights to physicians, touting itself as “the largest makers in the world of quinine and cocaine.” One such paperweight is available on eBay. Its seller boasts of its scratch-free surface since “many were used to chop cocaine lines on during the social drug era.” 

States began banning use of cocaine without a prescription, starting with Oregon, in 1887. New York, where CF Boehringer’s American offices were located, followed suit in 1893. Piece by piece, federal regulation chipped away at cocaine’s availability. In 1905, its use as a surgical anesthetic was largely ended by the introduction of Novocain. 

Sources: 

Jesús Calatayud and Ángel González. “History of the Development and Evolution of Local Anesthesia Since the Coca Leaf.”  Anesthesiology June 2003, Vol. 98, 1503–1508. 

Joseph Spillane. Cocaine: from Medical Marvel to Modern Menace. 2000 Johns Hopkins University Press. 

Dominic Streatfield. Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography. 2001 Thomas Dunne Books. 

Evaluating and Standardizing Therapeutic Agents, 1890-1950. Edited by Christoph Gradmann and Jonathan Simon. 2010 Palgrave Macmillan.