ABSTRACT
In the rush of euphoria that followed Karl Koller’s discovery that cocaine could be used as an anesthetic, medical professionals, the press, and readers of the daily papers believed what they wanted and discounted most of the bad news. Sigmund Freud, in his eager and uncritical enthusiasm for cocaine, had shown, to say the least, a rather selective reading of earlier accounts of coca’s effects. He seized on Johan von Tschudi’s story of Hataum Humang’s extraordinary feats as confirmation of coca’s miraculous powers. But von Tschudi had hardly written a blanket endorsement of coca. In fact, anyone who read all of von Tschudi’s book would have known that he was also very concerned about coca’s undesirable side effects, and that he even expressed concerns that Europeans might be more at risk for toxicity than the natives who had grown up chewing coca. It was not just that the habit disgusted him (“all who masticate coca have a very bad breath, pale lips and gums, greenish and stumpy teeth and an ugly black mark at the angles of the mouth”), he was also concerned that their habit was making them sick. As evidence, he cited their “sunken eyes, yellow skin” and “general apathy,” which all bore “evidence of the baneful effects of coca juice when taken in excess.”
