ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the western history of drug addiction and its relationship with medicine. Many addictive substances began their lives as medicines. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was fairly common for Europeans to recognise that addicts were often former sufferers of painful conditions requiring strong painkillers, which had then proven difficult to give up. This chapter discusses the often close proximity of medicine to addictive drugs and the curious blurring of boundaries that has sometimes emerged when people have described their experiences on these substances. Opium, the focus of this chapter, was sometimes, for instance, called a ‘false friend’ that could create ‘false peace.’ As with partial insanity, however, these new nuances never seem to have come close to overturning prevailing ideas about the difference between addictive oblivion and medicinal restoration. This is, perhaps, partly to do with a general desire to preserve the distinctive experience of tending to self and loved ones with medicine. Restoration cannot look and feel like oblivion. Key sources include the work of Thomas Trotter, Francis E. Anstie, Thomas de Quincey, Robert Christison and historians Roy Porter and Richard Davenport-Hines.
