“Book Descriptions: From acclaimed medical historian Howard Markel, author of When Germs Travel, the astonishing account, told for the first time, of the decades- long cocaine use of Sigmund Freud and William Halsted. Markel writes of the physical and emotional damage caused by the constant use of the then- heralded wonder drug, and of how each man ultimately changed the world in spite of it—or because of it. One became the father of psychoanalysis; the other, of modern surgery.
Using themselves as subjects in their research—Freud experimented with cocaine as a means of treating depression, fatigue, and morphine addiction; Halsted, as a new and safe form of anesthesia—each became caught up in the drug’s grip, nearly destroying his life, and unwittingly becoming the first participants in the birth of modern addiction. The author traces, as well, the drug’s effects on the thoughts and pathfinding work of each man. Historians and biographers have ignored or glossed over the day-by-day archival and medical records of the chronic cocaine abuse of each doctor, as well as the psychological and physical darkness it brought them and their struggles to rid their lives of it. Howard Markel’s An Anatomy of Addiction tells the full story, long overlooked, in its rich historical context.” DRIVE
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