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An extraordinary book encompassing the entire history of the world's most fascinating drug, and its dual nature as both destructive force and most powerful alleviator of pain.
Synopsis
Opium and its derivatives morphine and heroin have destroyed, corrupted, and killed individuals, families, communities, and even whole nations. And yet, for most of its long history, opium has also been humanity's most effective means of alleviating physical and mental pain. This book covers the history of this world's most fascinating drug.
Book Details
Publisher:
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Publication Date:
02-Mar-2012
ISBN:
9780300175325
Observer review
Opium: Reality's Dark Dream by Thomas Dormandy review
John Gallagher the observer Sat 28 April 2012
In 1840, Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browing, asking: "Can I be as good for you as morphine is for me, I wonder, even at the cost of being as bad also?" Both solace and scourge, opium has infiltrated our literary culture and history like no other substance. In the 1660s, Thomas Sydenham created an opium tincture. This purple syrup, laudanum, became the drug of choice for Romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Crabbe. Thomas de Quincey spoke of "an apocalypse of the world within me". At the same time, the "lulling charities" of the poppy could help to ease pain like many tuberculosis sufferers, Chopin passed away while sipping laudanum through a straw. Modern palliative care could not exist without opiates, even while soldiers decimate Afghan poppy fields.
The history of opium lives between the intimately personal and the overtly political. The debates that Thomas Dormandy charts with skill and sympathy cannot be easily resolved. In the end, like Elizabeth Barrett, we remain compelled by the everyday questions posed by "God's own medicine".
