Thomas De Quincey's Lifelong Addiction

THOMAS DE QUINCEY'S LIFELONG ADDICTION FRANCIS SCHILLER* The average person, not too well versed in English literature or drug abuse yet loath to be called naive, must feel a mild shock on coming across old Thomas De Quincey, portrayed with two lovely daughters and a grandchild in a cosy Victorian drawing dated 1855 [1; 2, vol. 1, frontispiece]. Was this the notorious drug addict who in 1821 published the Confessions ofan English Opium-Eater—this genteel septuagenarian, in an era when to reach threescore and ten was far from common? What are we to make ofthe confrontation: the reassuring pictorial evidence on one hand, the destructive and degrading stigma of the habit on the other? Are the answers in the books, those written by De Quincey, his commentators, the current ones on drug dependence? Does the evidence to any extent negate the popular view on the subject? Let us take one of the most recent and thoughtful commentators: Elizabeth Schneider, when she first thought of writing a psychological study of De Quincey—a project that ended as a monograph on Coleridge's partially opium-inspired "Kubla Khan"—found the "medical studies on opium different from what she had taken for granted." She concluded that De Quincey "has a great deal to answer for to the medical profession. It would have delighted his vanity to know that almost alone he dominated the scientific as well as the literary explanations . . . for nearly a hundred years." She went so far as to claim that he is "still whether they know it or not, the chief authority behind the knowledge even of many physicians," or at least he was so until the 1920s. Before that, "having derived their principles from these sources, moralizing physicians of the Victorian era rounded the circle of their argument by applying them back again. Coleridge and De Quincey were held up in solemn warning as examples of how the drug leads to wretchedness and destruction" [3, pp. vii, 28]. Well yes, but not quite. In 1856—born in 1785, De Quincey had 3 more years to live—G. B. Wood's standard American textbook on materia medica did acknowledge as "often very pernicious in its effects" the "enormous abuse of the drug" which he did call a "vice." But then he *Clinical professor of neurology and lecturer, History of Health Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1976 I 131 also found opium "less injurious either to the individual or to society than a similar abuse of alcohol. . . . Provided its use be restrained within certain limits, it does little apparent injury, even through a long course of years, and does not seem, obviously at least, to shorten life. ... In India and China ... we are told . . . those of a respectable position, who have a character to maintain do not suffer any seeming unfitness for the ordinary duties of life." In America its vast sales by apothecaries create "but comparatively few instances ... in which its ill effects are brought under the notice ofthe physician," and "the best British writers make the same statements." Regarding the evil effects, the distinction was presumably socioeconomic even more than ethnic. For our sceptical pharmacology text of 1856 goes on to say that "the effect of the vice . . . among the lower class of the Orientals have been frequently described"—England's gunboats had done their cruel share to enforce those effects, we might add—"and with such warm colouring that a suspicion is apt to arise of some interference of the imagination in the pictures given, especially as we do not meet their exact counterpart among those, who perhaps equally abandon themselves to the vice among ourselves." The outlook is not all bad: "It is satisfactory to know that this evil may be corrected, without great difficulty, ifthe patient is in earnest." The disorders are considered "mainly functional"; only on sudden withdrawal "life might be sacrificed," or it may lead to "delirium tremens ... (B. H. Coates, N. Am. Med. and Surg. Journ., IV. 34)" [4, pp. 732 ff.]. We may take this carefully balanced appraisal and its measured concern as in keeping with sophisticated opinion as much today...