Opium vapour: a familiar drug and a new method of delivery

Friedrich W. Sertürner first isolated a crystalline alkali from opium in 1816–17, naming his novel extract morphine, after Morpheus, the god of dreams. Prior to this, however, word of the curious uses of opium vapour in East Asia aroused European interest in an innovative means of opium delivery. Opium had been consumed on the European continent since antiquity, and may have been the only crop originally domesticated in Western Europe.Footnote ⁴ In Europe, however, opium was almost exclusively eaten.Footnote ⁵ East Asian opium smoking appears to have developed convergently with the spread of tobacco smoking, the earliest instances of opium smoking in East Asia being attested through the smoking of madak, a mixture of tobacco and opium, in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁶ The practice likely first emerged among overseas Chinese working and trading in Indonesia, subsequently bringing the practice with them back to China.Footnote ⁷ In the eighteenth century, the Chinese began vaporizing opium, for social and medicinal purposes, as the development of the opium vaporization pipe allowed opium vapour to be consumed separately from tobacco, though tobacco and opium smoking would continue to be used side by side.Footnote ⁸ Opium would remain a rare luxury through the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth, accessible largely to what Zheng refers to as the ‘Chinese robes’: courtly officials, scholars and society leaders.Footnote ⁹ This arrangement would change rapidly starting in 1820, when European opium importers massively increased efforts to bring opium into the country, jumping from 18,956 tonnes of opium in 1831 to 40,200 tonnes in 1839, culminating in the outbreak of the First Opium War.Footnote ¹⁰

Yet opium’s travels were neither unidirectional nor solely economic. Chinese opium use changed European medical practice. In 1809, Ettmüller introduced opium smoking into German medicine, inspired by a translation of Charpentier-Corsigny’s travels through China and Bengal.Footnote ¹¹ Shortly thereafter, he found himself treating a ‘young [and] very delicate hysterical woman’, who also appeared to suffer from ‘mental illness’ (Seelenleiden) in such an unfortunate confluence of circumstances that ‘all excitability was destroyed’.Footnote ¹² Ettmüller implored the woman and her husband to permit the heroic, experimental use of opium vapour. After putting half a scruple of opium on a hot iron beside the patient’s bed, the patient lapsed into a pleasant calm a mere half-hour later, sleeping for one hour with a happy smile on her face.Footnote ¹³ The procedure was repeated at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, this time with fifteen to twenty grains of opium. The same process was repeated twice in the next five days and the woman was soon cured.Footnote ¹⁴ Ettmüller goes on to report that he had since used the same method in a variety of cases, finding it effective in treating hysteria, post-partum mood, madness, melancholia, tumultuous nervous fevers and strong convulsions, without the bodily ills typical of internal opium and taking effect more rapidly.Footnote ¹⁵ It seemed to hinder excess blood flow to the head, resulting in a restful sleep, free from snoring. Ettmüller’s contribution quickly attracted attention, possibly owing to a growing interest in medicina fumigatoria. The same year, Cristoph Hufeland, already a celebrity and the most famous physician in Germany, published a lengthy article in his own journal, praising the therapeutic benefits of inhalation therapeutics.Footnote ¹⁶ Opium was not among the remedies discussed, but Hufeland’s article speaks to a growing interest in inhalation in the period surrounding Ettmüller’s case study.Footnote ¹⁷

Interest in opium vapour, and Ettmüller’s study, would appear again in 1827, when the physician Julius Heinrich Gottlieb Schlegel published on the possibility of criminal poisoning through the consumption of tobacco adulterated with arsenic.Footnote ¹⁸ He too noted the extraordinary insights afforded by Charpentier-Cossigny’s travelogue concerning the highly narcotic, and non-lethal, effects of opium smoking.Footnote ¹⁹ Schlegel recounted Ettmüller’s pioneering use of opium vapour in a therapeutic setting, appearing to accept the method’s benefits at face value. In association with the criminal use of arsenic vapours in cases of poisoning, Schlegel repeats a questionable account of an Englishman who, while staying in Canton, had his money chest stolen when a group of Chinese thieves blew such an excess of opium smoke into his bedroom that he became completely anaesthetized.Footnote ²⁰ Schlegel evidently believed this anecdote, as, for Schlegel, it was ‘well known that the Chinese are the shrewdest fraudsters and thieves on earth’.Footnote ²¹ In spite of such transparent anti-Chinese rhetoric, Schlegel’s choice to include the anecdote reflected on his clear belief in the therapeutic efficacy of opium inhalation. By then, references to the use of opium vapours in the treatment of a variety of illnesses had begun to appear in disparate medical texts, including Friedrich Puchelt’s notable Das System der Medicin.Footnote ²²

From here, we see a gradual yet consistent spread in the use of, and argument for, the benefits of opium vapour therapy. In 1834, Ferdinand Martin-Solon presented an argument for the systematic use of inhaled vapours in medical practice, a method which he called ‘l’atmiatrie’.Footnote ²³ Writing on the treatment of untreatable dyspnea, Johann Ebers of Breslau wrote of his experiments with a solution of two parts ether and one part opium tincture.Footnote ²⁴ The narcotic solution was mixed with a small amount of boiling water in a porcelain vessel and patients were made to quickly inhale the vapours.Footnote ²⁵ Ebers noted that the preparation was effective in abating the onset of an attack that might have left the patient unconscious, if not dead.Footnote ²⁶

Published several years later, Alfred Beaumont Maddock’s 1845 book Observations on the Efficacy of Medicated Inhalations presents the inhalation of opium or morphine vapours as not only a useful form of treatment for an assortment of bronchial and pulmonary illnesses, but also a treatment method divorced from ‘the costiveness or cerebral congestion, which frequently ensue when they are administered by the stomach’.Footnote ²⁷ Alongside opium vapours, Maddock listed conium (hemlock), hyosciamus, papaver (poppy), acetate of morphine, digitalis, lactuca, belladonna, and colchicum as ‘the most to be depended on’, finding inhalation to be a potent, and yet largely neglected, treatment method (Figure 1).Footnote ²⁸

Figure 1.

Maddock’s device for the inhalation of medicinal vapours.

Clearly, the inhalation of opium vapours had emerged as an object of European medical interest in the first half of the nineteenth century. Far from being vilified as a vile and dangerous practice rooted in oriental barbarism, physicians understood the inhalation of opium vapour to be a valid form of opium delivery, often touting it as an improvement upon the familiar means. Notably, none of the listed studies ventured to replicate the Chinese method of opium smoking. The basis for this approach appears to have been the straightforward assumption that consuming opium vapour in any capacity would have a similar effect. Opium vapours were taken in indirectly through fumigation, through etheric steam vapours, or through a water pipe, as seen in the case of Maddock. Nor was there any specific concern for the opium’s particular form. Rather than debate the merits of raw versus refined opium of various forms and types, physicians seem to have been largely focused on the use of opium qua opium, whether it took the form of a tincture or any kind of pure opium. This situation was rapidly changing by the middle of the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by Louis Waldenburg’s 1864 Die Inhalationen der zerstäubten Flüssigkeiten, a classic text in the history of inhalation therapy.

A textbook on respiratory therapy, Louis Waldenburg’s 1864 book was by no means centrally focused on the therapeutic effects of opium vapour and in many ways reflects the ideas repeatedly presented over the preceding decades. Waldenburg retells how ‘the use of narcotic vapors for inhalation comes from the Far East, China and India, where smoking narcotic substances had been a long-standing practice and their effectiveness was much better known’.Footnote ²⁹ On the basis of preceding studies and reports from the colonial East, Waldenburg noted that ‘opium smoke has a very narcotic, calming effect and produces a pleasant, voluptuous sleep’.Footnote ³⁰ Waldenburg further noted that a moderate amount of opium vapour provided immediate relief from asthma attacks, in addition to stopping the attack altogether, where a ‘colossal dose’ of internal opium would have only temporarily abated the symptoms.Footnote ³¹

As imperial commerce pushed ever more opium into East Asia, the ‘Eastern’ innovation of inhaling opium vapours had successfully been naturalized on the European continent, converging on a novel form of inhalation therapy. And yet Waldenburg was writing at a time when the adoption of opium vapour as a straightforward method of opium delivery was starting to fall apart at the seams. Experimental science had already begun cast doubt on the basis for opium vapour therapy: the temperatures required to smoke opium destroyed the active principles. Opium smoking ought to be impossible. By the 1860s, Waldenburg himself would be forced to contend with the historical efficacy of opium vapour therapy on the one hand and the prescriptions of experimental science on the other.

The chemical problem of opium smoking

The influences underpinning the shift to an experimental interest in the chemical constitution of opium vapour advanced on several fronts. Interest in opium vapour had continued to develop on a therapeutic level through the mid-nineteenth century, intersecting with the ascendant experimental sciences of organic chemistry and pharmacology. This set the stage for such an encounter, but the impetus for this turn appears – once again – to stem from the growing body of reports from the Far East. The exponential growth of the European opium trade saw an unprecedented number of European visitors to China, all the more so after Britain’s victory in the First Opium War (1839–42) and the resulting Treaty of Nanking legalized the trade and permitted European missionaries to work in China.Footnote ³² Where scholarly literature on opium smoking in East Asia had once been fragmentary at best, the middle of the century furnished a learned European audience with an excess of detail. Colonial physicians began to report not only on the mechanics of opium smoking, but also on its rates of consumption, the legislation of its use, the processes of its sale and preparation, the chemical composition of particular opium crops, and – most importantly – the medical effects of its use. An example of one such report which had an almost immediate effect on the emergence of European opium science was that of Singapore-based physician Robert Little’s ‘On the habitual use of opium’.

The impact of Robert Little’s ‘On the habitual use of opium’ is difficult to overstate. A travel report from the Far East, neither was it the first of its kind, nor would it be the last.Footnote ³³ Yet, for many on the European continent, Little’s write-up represented the most in-depth description not only of how opium was cultivated and prepared, but also of how it was used and how such use presented over the long term within a population for whom its use was endemic. German summaries of Little’s report would appear in Schmidts Jahrbücher in 1850, with an immediate effect on the work of Ernst von Bibra, amongst others.Footnote ³⁴ In France, Little’s study explicitly formed the basis of a call to restrict opium’s availability and consumption, printed in the Journal de médecine et de chirurgie pratiques amidst a series of government proclamations.Footnote ³⁵

In addition to a wealth of detail pertaining to how different types of opium were gathered, packaged and used, Little delivered a painstakingly detailed reconstruction of how opium was prepared for smoking. In Singapore, where he was situated, Little remarked, opium was smoked in the Chinese style, never in its raw form but first refined into what was then called ‘chandu’:Footnote ³⁶

The purpose of such a protracted process was, in Little’s eyes, self-evidently to filter out impurities—waxes, oils, vegetable matter, resin and some narcotine.Footnote ³⁸ But – more than that – it made the chandu ‘less irritating and more soporific’.Footnote ³⁹ Though Little presents no proposals for the sense in which chandu was more soporific than raw opium latex, this crucial detail would seem to inform Little’s understanding of opium use as uniquely pernicious.

Little was well aware of the differences of opinion which surrounded the opium phenomenon in the Far East. Encountering the same scene, a pair of observers might variously find ‘a canker eating into the vitals of society’ or ‘a lighter curse than dram drinking and a far pleasanter’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Though the latter view seemed to enjoy a certain degree of popularity, Little was swift to admonish those who sought to look upon opium smoking permissively, as he wrote in ecstatic prose:

Anticipating comparisons between opium use and chronic drunkenness, Little remarked that ‘many drink but do not abuse it, many smoke opium, but all abuse it’.Footnote ⁴² Opium smoking was necessarily addictive; all who smoked opium would need to smoke more. Even ‘amusement repeated now and again is at length continued daily, until the habit at last established can never be broken off unless with the life of the individual’.Footnote ⁴³ Responding to the letters of other physicians who saw opium smoked for over eighty years in moderation without ill effects, Little retorted that ‘the only limit to their indulgence is their means’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Though it is often difficult to separate the European perception of opium smoking as a Chinese practice from their perceptions of the Chinese themselves, Little does appear to attribute the damnable effects of opium addiction to the drug itself. It was the unique chemical processes entailed in the processes of opium preparation and inhalation that caught European attention, with the German naturalist, chemist and botanist Ernst von Bibra being one of the first to translate Little’s observations into a question of chemistry.

Bibra was someone for whom Little’s report proved immediately instructive, raising Little to a position of almost singular authority on the effects of opium smoking in his most famous work, Die narkotischen Genußmittel und der Mensch (1855).Footnote ⁴⁵ In keeping with the book’s focus on plant intoxicants, opium smoking represented an important phenomenon, although Germany lacked opium smokers for Bibra to observe. The book Unter dem Äquator, written by a friend of Bibra’s, the novelist and adventurer Friedrich Gerstäcker, offered a limited, romantic glimpse into the lives of Javanese opium smoking.Footnote ⁴⁶ Bibra had further seen Malay opium smoking first-hand during his South American travels in the years 1849 and 1850, though such encounters were limited and fleeting. Bibra went as far as travelling to Erlangen to visit Theodor Wilhelm Christian Martius (1796–1863), who, having greatly expanded on his father Ernest Wilhelm Martius’s pharmaceutical collection, was in possession of a high-end Chinese opium pipe.Footnote ⁴⁷ But, for all of his efforts to infer observations from these fragmentary and indirect sources, Bibra was nevertheless left to do a great deal of ‘reading between the lines’ in extracting physio-chemical inferences from the materials available.

Robert Little’s ‘On the habitual use of opium’ seems to have represented the most thorough account of opium smoking and its effects available to Bibra, and much of what Bibra writes on the topic is lifted word for word from the pages of Little’s report. In addition to a series of social observations on the opium phenomenon in Singapore, Bibra noted, ‘The effects of opium taken internally and those of smoked opium, which are generally similar, seem to differ so far from one another’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Opium smoking appeared to be far more than merely an alternative method of consuming opium. It engendered different effects altogether. An explanation for this perceived variation in effect can be found in the process by which raw opium was ‘prepared,’ or made into chandu. Bibra takes this directly from Little, quoting the very same passages referenced earlier in this paper.Footnote ⁴⁹ While he relays the principal steps of the process without any notable variation, when it comes to the fourth step, that of recooking the already filtered opium in copper pans, Bibra adds a crucial editorial insight:

Bibra had proposed a theory for how the refinement process made the opium ‘milder and less exciting’.Footnote ⁵¹ Bibra was suggesting that chandu contained some discrete alkaloidal substance not found in raw opium, a new substance which accounted for the unique effects attributed to smoking opium. Chandu production, opium smoking – both suddenly appeared to entail some chemical change, God-given opium alchemically transformed into a force of perceived social decay. Bibra went as far as to attempt to prepare his own chandu according to the process described by Little; however, when he smoked it, Bibra was unable to achieve the effects so often ascribed to the substance.Footnote ⁵² Unable to persuade any of his acquaintances to test his preparation, Bibra attributed the failure to an error on his part, possibly his use of powdered Smyrna opium.Footnote ⁵³ But Bibra’s text was only the beginning. It was soon followed by a vast array of increasingly detailed, experimental encounters with the chemical constitution of chandu, each with its own answers to the question of a novel alkaloid present in opium vapour.

Development of the idea: further chemical analyses of opium vapour

Suspicions of unseen chemical changes in the process of opium smoking spread rapidly across the European continent. Ever since Sertürner’s 1816–17 identification of morphine as the first alkaloid, the chemical properties of morphine, particularly its variable solubility and the nature of its various salts, had been a focus of organic chemistry. By the 1860s, it was known that opium contained, at least, ‘Morphium, Codein, Thebain, Narcotin, Papaverin, Meconin und Narcein’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The issue, as far as the chemistry of opium smoking was concerned, was that Heinrich Limpricht’s Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie had shown that neither morphine, ‘the most active of these substances’, nor the other listed alkaloids were prone to vaporization.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rudolf Buchheim, father of experimental pharmacology, had similarly conceded that ‘opium smoking engenders the destruction of morphine’ as early as 1856.Footnote ⁵⁶

Each alkaloid preferred to remain either in solution or, if dry, to carbonize, save for meconine, which sublimated but had no known narcotic effects.Footnote ⁵⁷ The implication was that vaporizing morphine, or any other active components of opium, was only possible under highly controlled conditions. Experimental chemistry suggested that opium smoking ought to be impossible. On the other hand, it could scarcely be denied that opium smoking had narcotic effects. Louis Waldenburg proposed, much like Bibra, ‘that when dry opium is heated, new decomposition products are formed, which have an intense narcotic effect’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Limpricht had already demonstrated that heat decomposed thebaine into different chemical components, and so it theoretically held for other opium alkaloids.Footnote ⁵⁹ Opium vapour’s unique therapeutic effects had to be a function of some yet unknown chemical change.

In the two decades that followed, a general understanding of the undecided chemical nature of opium vapour gradually pervaded the research community, while therapeutic use of opium vapour persisted. In 1869, Fronmüller experimented with chandu on no less than fifty patients and found it effectively reduced pain.Footnote ⁶⁰ In spite of this ambiguity, Waldenburg would continue to support the use of opium vapour for the treatment of asthma in his 1872 Die locale Behandlung der Krankheiten der Athmungsorgane.Footnote ⁶¹ Max Joseph Oertel’s ‘Respiratorische Therapie’, published in Hugo Ziemssen’s authoritative Handbuch der allgemeinen Therapie, likewise noted the therapeutic efficacy of opium vapour in a tradition traced back to Ettmüller.Footnote ⁶² Oertel was keen to acknowledge that ‘the narcotic substances that have an effect when opium is burned are not yet precisely known’, and further that ‘it has not yet been determined chemically whether one of the components … sublimes without being decomposed or whether new decomposition products are formed which produce the observable, intense narcotic effect’.Footnote ⁶³ Although opium vapour remained an object of therapeutic interest, doubts surrounding its chemical constitution were increasingly normalized in the broader scientific community. Opium vapour appeared void of known alkaloids.

The idea soon spread rapidly outside Germany. Hasselt and Burgersdijk’s 1869 ‘Over de afwezigheid van opium-alcaloïden in den opiumrook’ clearly reflects the idea’s established presence in the Netherlands. The title alone, ‘On the absence of opium alkaloids in opium vapour’, implied a general awareness that opium vapour contained no known opium-derived alkaloids. Passing the opium vapour through various different solutions, Hasselt and Burgersdijk expected to find some trace of the alkaloids present in raw opium.Footnote ⁶⁴ To their astonishment, chemical analysis concluded that no opium alkaloids were present in any of the solutions.

Awareness of the idea also took hold among French researchers, some of whom sought to oppose the theory on experimental grounds. In 1890, a French colonial physician in Saigon, Lalande, published an influential paper proposing a method of measuring the alkaloidal content of opium vapour. Chandu vapours were captured in a series of bottles containing a highly acidic solution, allowing morphine present in the vapour to enter solution and be analysed.Footnote ⁶⁵ After several days, Lalande was reportedly shocked by the amount of morphine dissolved in the solution, a quantity he believed to be impossible.Footnote ⁶⁶ Unfortunately, Lalande did not detail his analytic method, or the actual quantity of morphine yielded in his experiments. Lalande nevertheless concluded that, with an average morphine content of 7.5 per cent, a typical chandu consumer took approximately 0.37 grams of morphine, with only a portion of it entering the blood stream.Footnote ⁶⁷

Henri Moissan of the Ecole supérieure de pharmacie de Paris, the first French Nobel laureate in chemistry, conducted his own series of experiments on the chemical composition of opium vapour in 1892–3.Footnote ⁶⁸ Having successfully obtained samples of chandu from Shanghai, Patna and Saigon, Moissan sought to develop an experiment that could, to the greatest degree possible, reproduce the actual process of smoking chandu.Footnote ⁶⁹ Heating chandu with a lamp offered no method of properly controlling heat, so Moissan used thermo-electric tongs to heat the chandu in a glass tube.Footnote ⁷⁰ Using this method, Moissan established that 250 °C was the temperature required to produce a vapour and, through increasing the temperature, Moissan was able to analyse the chemical contents of the vapour at different levels of decomposition using various colour reactions.Footnote ⁷¹ Analysis of the vapours yielded few volatile substances – save an extremely small amount of morphine – and several decomposition products, namely pyrrole, acetone, pyridine and hydropyric bases, further noting the presence of an unknown yellow-brown distillate.Footnote ⁷² As for how the effects of smoking opium could possibly result from the chemical contents of its vapour, Moissan had no answer, but morphine hardly seemed the culprit.

We find the research question further attested in British sources. In 1883, Hugh McCallum, a British government analyst in Hong Kong, published an influential paper in the Pharmaceutical Journal and Transactions under the deceptively plain title ‘Opium and opium smoking’.Footnote ⁷³ Well aware that the ‘morality of the opium trade has been discussed at great length and with much heat’, particularly by those who found it a habit ‘of the most pernicious and degrading character’, McCallum set out to uncover the underlying chemical nature of opium smoking.Footnote ⁷⁴ By McCallum’s report, the majority of the Anglo world still assumed that the effects of opium smoking were identical to those of opium eating, suggesting that ‘nine-tenths’ of those who followed the issue held this notion.Footnote ⁷⁵ But McCallum held sincere doubts. He quotes Sir George Birdwood, himself quoting the Scottish toxicologist Sir Robert Christison, who argued that opium smoking was harmless, as ‘none of the active principles of opium are volatilizable’.Footnote ⁷⁶ But finding Birdwood lacking in supporting evidence, McCallum set out to examine morphine’s volitizability for himself.

From the outset, McCallum noted that ‘anyone who is at all conversant with organic substances will at once recognize that the prolonged boiling … must necessarily have a degrading action on its alkaloidal constituents’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Assuming that appreciable quantities of alkaloids survived the refinement process, it is only in a pure state, under highly controlled circumstances, that ‘it is possible to volatize [morphine] unchanged’, which in the ‘smoking of a pipe of opium is highly improbable’.Footnote ⁷⁸ McCallum noted that Descharmes and Bénard found traces of morphine in opium smoke and that Thudichum prescribed it as a remedy, but none reproduced the actual process of opium smoking. A complicating factor was McCallum’s observation that ‘the temperature at which the prepared opium is smoked … would appear to be at a higher temperature than that at which the opium alkaloids are decomposed’.Footnote ⁷⁹ It was ‘almost if not quite impossible that morphine can exist, even in infinitesimal quantities, in opium smoke which has passed through an opium pipe’.Footnote ⁸⁰ It had to be assumed that, ‘whatever the effects of opium smoking may be’, they are not the result of opium’s ‘active principle, namely, morphine’.Footnote ⁸¹ Instead, morphine’s ‘decomposition [products] by heat are the active agents’.Footnote ⁸² Such findings supported the argument that ‘the effects of opium eating and opium smoking are by no means analogous, but … altogether different’.Footnote ⁸³ Yet such conclusions left McCallum with burning questions: ‘Whence the pleasure? What gives rise to it?’Footnote ⁸⁴ McCallum left these questions to future investigations.

Another Hong Kong government analyst, Frank Browne, would present similar findings to the Hong Kong legislative council on 24 February 1908.Footnote ⁸⁵ Citing the precedents set by Moissan, McCallum and others, Browne’s paper, ‘Report on opium, its nature, composition, preparations, and methods of consumption’, expressed his confidence that smoking chandu represented no greater threat than smoking tobacco, owing to the chemical constitution of its vapours.Footnote ⁸⁶ Browne expanded on earlier studies by introducing the more consistent method of analysing the chemical contents of opium dross, the scrapings left in and on the pipe bowl after the opium was smoked.Footnote ⁸⁷ Browne found that 7.63 per cent morphine was simply left in the dross, which, with some lost through decomposition and a starting morphine content of roughly 8.5 per cent, meant that the effects of opium could not be the result of morphine vaporization.Footnote ⁸⁸

With the nineteenth-century opium trade at its peak, researchers from across the European sphere of influence had converged on the study of the chemical constitution of opium vapour and found themselves with more questions than answers. Most felt that opium smoking had physiological effects, although no known opium alkaloids were the culprit. Some seemed to doubt whether smoking opium had any physiological effects at all. At the same time, popular and scientific interest in opium smoking had only grown. The late nineteenth century saw the publication of one of the period’s most famous German-language books on the topic of opium – the Swiss pharmacologist Carl Hartwich’s Das Opium als Genussmittel (1898).Footnote ⁸⁹ Hartwich’s Opium described not only the economic and material processes of the opium trade, but also the practical art of opium use, supported by vivid images of opium accoutrements, objects still shrouded in obscurity and mystery for much of the learned German public (Figure 2).Footnote ⁹⁰

Figure 2.

Images of Hartwich’s opium collection (Hartwich, 1898). Most of these pieces are still on display at ETH Zurich as part of the Hartwich Collection.

Hartwich, though trained as a pharmaceutical chemist, did not address the chemical nature of opium smoking in Opium. Nikolas Simon, a student of Hartwich’s, selected the alkaloidal content of opium vapour as the topic of his dissertation, published in 1903. Gathering together all the known studies on the subject, Simon’s dissertation represented the first book-length study on the chemical nature of opium vapour. The chemical analysis was structured in such a way as to decisively prove that opium alkaloids could not account for the effects of smoking opium. Prior to analysing the chemical contents of vaporized chandu, Simon attempted to sublimate pure morphine.Footnote ⁹¹ After ten minutes at 300 °C, the morphine no longer gave a morphine reaction, but a different, albeit faint, response to the reagent.Footnote ⁹² Narcotine behaved similarly to morphine, at the far lower temperature of 176 °C. Even using a large quantity of the pure alkaloid, only an incredibly small amount of morphine could be made to sublimate.Footnote ⁹³ Renewing his experiment with a sample of chandu, Simon found the same result, now with an even smaller amount of morphine vapour.Footnote ⁹⁴ Like Moissan, the primary chemical entities that Simon identified in morphine and chandu vapour were pyridine, pyrrole, acetate and methylamine.Footnote ⁹⁵ Simon concluded that ‘in opium smoking the morphine and narcotine are not involved in the effect, but rather the decomposition products of the same’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The effects of opium smoking had to be the result of some kind of decomposition product of the high temperatures involved.

Carl Hartwich accepted his student’s findings. His 1911 Die menschlichen Genussmittel argued that opium smoking needed to be understood as distinct from the use of oral opium or morphine because ‘the morphine and other alkaloids probably play no role [in its effects] at all, at least not in any way notable, but rather their decomposition products and other substances formed during combustion’.Footnote ⁹⁷ That opium smoking was incomparable with morphine use did not, in Hartwich’s eyes, evidence that opium smoking was safe, as it did for McCallum and Browne.Footnote ⁹⁸ On the contrary, it was clear to Hartwich that the scourge of opium smoking had wreaked havoc upon the enterprising spirits of the Asiatic peoples, leaving only atrophy and dissipation.Footnote ⁹⁹ Whatever the identity of the novel narcotic produced in the process of heating opium, it was to be regarded as a pernicious and dangerous substance, on par with, or even more dangerous than, pure morphine.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Repeated experiments, spanning over fifty years and strewn across two continents, had exhaustively demonstrated that the effects of opium smoking could not be caused by morphine. What was the impact of these concerted efforts to finally identify the chemical constitution of opium vapour, or the claim that morphine could not account for opium smoking’s effects? Colonial officials had a more favourable impression of opium smoking than European researchers like Hartwich, Bibra or Waldenburg, finding that, despite its intoxicating effects, no active alkaloids were consumed in the process. This divergence in opinion can be explained by the fact that, far from being an obscure theoretical concern, the chemical constitution of opium vapour was a central site of negotiation and renegotiation concerning the biomedical reality of the colonial world.

The coloniality of opium science

A striking element of the various investigations of the continental European experimenters is the nature of the possible harms attached to opium smoking. For Bibra, writing in and from a Continental perspective around the middle of the nineteenth century, oral opium use was useful as a medicine, but was not without real dangers.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Bibra understood opium eating as a familiar, limited problem. Such a position was more or less consistent with contemporary opinions. Oral opium was not generally regarded as problematic, even if medical opinions on possible detrimental effects varied.Footnote ¹⁰² Opium smoking, precisely because it relied on a potent, unknown narcotic by-product of either the chandu process or the actual act of opium smoking, was conversely regarded as something of a dangerous social contagion. Looking to Simon and Hartwich, writing half a century later on the same issue, we find this general perspective largely unchanged. For all of the development seen in the recently emerged field of pharmacology, the dangerous social effects of some decomposition product of morphine, as yet ill-defined, continued to cause concern for these writers.Footnote ¹⁰³

Others, mostly working in the colonies, instead interpreted the experimental impossibility of vaporizing morphine as support for the claim that opium smoking was ultimately safe, as no alkaloids were actually being consumed. McCallum concluded his report with the remark that ‘the Anti-Opium Society and its supporters are not justified in branding the opium trade with infamy, or the lovers of a pipe as degraded beings’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ McCallum’s findings in every sense agreed with the likes of his would-be colleagues in Europe, though his conclusions about the socio-moral dimension of opium smoking could not have been more different. Browne likewise argued that opium smoking was no worse than smoking tobacco.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The fact that morphine was not the cause of any of opium smoking’s effects meant that opium smoking was unequatable with the problem of morphinism.

The varied conclusions drawn by otherwise concordant research into the content of opium vapour stems in part from shifting attitudes concerning the use of opium and morphine. It has already been established that opium eating was not regarded by Europeans as much of a problem in the first half of the nineteenth century. Medical opinion on the social impact of opium consumption would undergo a significant transformation in the 1860s and 1870s, with opium, and particularly morphine, increasingly being regarded as a dangerous poison. The societal dynamics converging on the mid-nineteenth-century changes in attitude regarding opium eating in England were complex, reflecting class- and gender-based anxieties surrounding its perceived widespread use among the working class, including working-class mothers, all alongside a growing reticence concerning the recently invented hypodermic morphine.

Hypodermic morphine was initially presented as a viable alternative to oral opium use.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Mid-nineteenth-century advocacy for the superiority of the hypodermic method, delivering chemically pure morphine directly into the body by way of a novel technological artifice, reflected the experimentalist preoccupations of the age. Collective concerns about the dangers of hypodermic morphine only began to take hold in the 1870s in response to the fear – real or imagined – that hypodermic morphine had become fashionable among upper-class women.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By the time Eduard Levinstein first published on the topic of morphinism as an independent medical phenomenon in 1877, several other physicians in France and Germany had already published on chronic morphine use as a growing cause for concern.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Though shifting perceptions of morphine on the European continent partially account for the differences of opinion in the second half of the nineteenth century, there is another factor that might account for these divergent opinions.

A crucial distinction between the works of McCallum, Lalande and Browne and those of their European counterparts was their professional status as Hong Kong government analysts or colonial functionaries. The British East India Company took command of the state opium monopoly in India as early as 1757 and the Crown assumed propriety in 1858, legally establishing the British Hong Kong monopoly in 1860.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Though they oversaw a vast array of operations, including the improvement of medical treatment and the monitoring of the water supply, Hong Kong government analysts were functionaries of the British colonial authority and thus had a vested interest in upholding the highly profitable opium monopoly. It is thus hardly shocking that McCallum and Browne, as Hong Kong government analysts, would marshal the authority of experimental science to find opium vapour largely bereft of morphine, a substance increasingly regarded as dangerous. For those writing on the subject in Europe, the deleterious effects of opium smoking were more readily prescribed, as much an assumption of the Asiatic addict’s moral turpitude as an inquisition against imperial profiteers. This is not to ascribe malicious intent to those who found opium smoking to be largely unproblematic. On the contrary, there is a growing body of scholarship which advances the argument, as many did in the nineteenth century, that the problem of opium smoking was never as problematic as presented, or at the very least that the vilification of the practice along racial lines lent itself to hyperbole.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It may have very well been the case that a Hong Kong government analyst was better situated than most European observers to assess the extent to which opium smoking was a force of social decay.

There were several researchers interested in the chemical constitution of opium vapour even more directly implicated in the furtherance of colonial opium. It was while France was in the process of organizing an Indo-Chinese opium monopoly in 1891 that the French bacteriologist Albert Calmette travelled to Saigon and met the industrialist René de Saint-Mathurin.Footnote ¹¹¹ Though some opposed the idea, French colonial administrators were motivated by an interest in controlling not merely the sale of opium but also its production.Footnote ¹¹² In seeking to understand the chandu refinement process, Calmette turned to Lalande’s paper, which guided his efforts to muster the technological and theoretical innovations of Louis Pasteur in the furtherance of a regulated state opium monopoly in French Indo-China.Footnote ¹¹³ Calmette focused on the role of fermentation in chandu preparation, an element of the chandu production process vulnerable to the full might of French Enlightenment science.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Far greater than the bureaucratic or military power of the colonial government, science could ‘achieve by peaceful means what had previously only been possible through violence’, a wellspring of technological, cultural and epistemic authority.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Pasteurization would similarly wipe away the miasmas of France’s colonial holdings, civilizing the land, beginning with opium. It was science – in the words of Louis Pasteur – ‘which brings man closer to God’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

While nearly all of the researchers already discussed wrote on the chandu fermentation process, the overwhelming consensus was that fermentation served the sole purpose of changing opium’s flavour. It had no effect on the alkaloids. Calmette saw something else: a time-consuming and overlooked aspect of the refinement process poised to become more efficient. Conducting his own research, Calmette quickly realized that the fungus described by Lalande and so many others was an Aspergillus fungus, ‘responsible for consuming excess glucose and dextrin in the product and transforming tannin into gallic acid, creating the distinctive taste of quality chandoo’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Seeding chandu with lab-grown Aspergillus cultures, Calmette managed to cut the fermentation process from a year to a month, an innovation that promised to all but ensure French dominance over the opium trade.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Yet production in the factory failed to make good on the laboratory’s promise, leaving Calmette with five thousand kilograms of low-quality chandu, a financial disaster for the French authorities and the topic of brief, but intense, scientific discourse.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Only later would representatives from the Pasteur Institute develop methods of improving the chandu refinement process.Footnote ¹²⁰

Opium smoking clearly represented a complex theoretical and practical problem for European experimenters, even when direct efforts were made to make use of opium science in legitimizing the opium trade and extend colonial authority. A possible critique is that opium science was nevertheless embedded in a process of consolidating material and epistemic power over the colonial subject. Though opium smoking does not immediately accord with Headrick’s description of medicine as a crucial tool of empire, McMahon reminds us that the Chinese referred to opium as yangyao, ‘the Western drug’, a moniker suiting both its economic and its sociocultural centrality in the Western–Chinese encounter.Footnote ¹²¹ And yet adopters of opium vapour therapy exhibit a demonstrable lack of prejudice considering opium smoking’s association with the Orient. It appeared to them an innovative method of delivering a well-known and reliable medicine. Their uptake of the method was, if anything, enthusiastic. The emergence of a subsequent research programme surrounding the impossibility of sublimating morphine likewise exhibited a life beyond its symbolic, tangential or even constituting associations with colonial politics. The chemical constitution of opium vapour emerged as a real theoretical problem in chemistry, calling forth responses from across the European continent. The complex story of opium science evidently suggests something more fundamental about the nature of epistemic transculturation in colonial science.

Intoxicating colonial science

We have seen how the implications of opium science variously reflected perceptions of Asian migrants and the colonial order, but such conclusions were in each case a response to the central problem of morphine’s sublimability. What was the nature of the knowledge exchange implicated in opium science and what can it tell us about the circulation of knowledge in a colonial context? Our answer is found in something all but assumed by nearly everyone involved in the history of opium science, something so fundamental to the antecedent premises of inquiry that it all but disappears: the intoxicating effects of opium smoking. In doing so, we uncover the sense in which intoxication itself, or the presumption of its existence, influenced the experimental processes of opium science, further circumscribing the distinct forms of encounter described by colonial and Continental experimenters.

Keith McMahon, among others, has suggested ‘that opium becomes a new kind of substance when it appears in smokable form among masses of users in East and Southeast Asia’.Footnote ¹²² European opium science attested to just such a genesis, instead offering a chemical – rather than sociocultural – ontology of opium smoking. The European encounter with opium smoking was many things. It was an effort to wrestle with a pesky theoretical problem in applied pharmaceutical chemistry. It was a methodological discourse largely limited to a European medical audience interested in opium vapour therapy. It was a contest of competing, national scientific methodologies, with German, French, Dutch and British researchers treating the same paradox in different ways and in pursuit of different ends. It was a scientific inquiry of practical import in colonial governance, marshalled in efforts both to make opium production more efficient and to reframe scrutiny of the opium trade. But – most of all – it was a protracted struggle to balance the chemical problem of morphine sublimation against the presumptive facticity of opium intoxication. To understand these complex axes of interrelation we might borrow from Fan’s concept of ‘cultural borderlands’.Footnote ¹²³ Fan’s language of ‘cultural borderlands’ illustrates the sense in which the network of colonial science ‘wasn’t like a single wheel with the hub, in say, London’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Such webs of scientific exchange were, instead, polycentric, ‘with multiple layers of authority and interaction’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Opium smoking becomes just such a ‘site’ of methodological ‘contestation’ and ‘transculturation’, with Europe and the cultural borderlands of colonial science engendering different kinds of encounter.Footnote ¹²⁶

Fan’s ‘cultural borderlands’ help contextualize opium science as a body of research involved in the negotiation of various divergent, sometimes competing, perspectives. It does not, however, provide an account of why researchers largely deemed morphine sublimation impossible, and yet assumed that opium vapours nevertheless had potent effects. This should be baffling. There was no positive experimental evidence to corroborate this hypothesis. It would have been easier to matter-of-factly conclude that opium smoking produced no effect. Experiments surrounding the methodology of opium smoking may have constituted the site of these various encounters, but each experiment is more fundamentally an effort to account for the subjective intoxicating effect of opium smoking. It was the initial assumption of opium smoking’s intoxicating effects that shaped the conclusions drawn by European experimenters.

Examining the influence of intoxication on opium science, we see how the intoxicated experiences of colonial subjects become embedded in the material culture of experimentation. Angus Bancroft argues that drug ‘objects have the power of embodying all kinds of relationships and dispositions, of pleasure, pathology and recovery’.Footnote ¹²⁷ ‘In the rhetoric of intoxication, each quality is constructed in relationship to others such that the sweetness of sugar only exists in relation to the bitterness, acidity’, and so on of other substances.Footnote ¹²⁸ The ‘material culture’ of drugs and their forms of consumption ‘reproduces and affirms these social relationships which become, in part, relationships between objects’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Opium smoking as method and practice is inextricable from the experience of intoxication itself. More importantly, at question was not opium smoking as such, but the phenomenon of East Asian opium smoking. Much as the question of morphine’s sublimatability was incomparable with that of a substance like rubber, chandu smoking was not like chewing coca or sipping brandy. The method itself has been constructed relative to explicit embedded relationships, be they historical, social, cultural, racial or material. With opium smoking’s emergence as an object of scientific investigation, the contents of opium science existed only in relation to a discrete series of cultural, social and historical practices in association with the colonial experience of opium intoxication.

We can see the embeddedness of East Asian opium intoxication reflected in the simple observation that no European experimentalists doubted whether opium smoking had an intoxicating effect on East Asian consumers. If anything, the spatial and cultural locality of European science only further entrenches the inscrutability of opium smoking’s effects. Largely unable to directly encounter the East Asian opium experience in situ, European researchers did not directly study the Chinese experience of opium intoxication; they were excluded from the experimental process. European science instead addresses the method of opium smoking itself. In this sense, European experimental science sought to make universal claims about the chemical constitution of opium vapour, while their conclusions were preconditioned by their perception of the experiences of Asian opium smokers. Colonial intoxication was enfolded in the process of experimental inquiry from the very start.

We further see how colonial science, located in a ‘cultural borderland’, grappled with intoxication quite differently. The rudimentary theoretical principles underlying these studies were fundamentally identical with those faced by their colleagues on the Continent, and they largely reached the same conclusions on the chemical level. Both conclusions further relied on knowledges external to the experiments themselves – anecdotal evidence of opium’s social influence, personal observations, legal and economic pressures, religious concerns and so on. And on this account the conclusions of the colonial scientists represent a radical departure. Where one found evidence of opium smoking’s unique dangers, the other garnered testimony to opium smoking’s innocuousness. Opium smoking was still theoretically impossible. But neither could deny the experiential reality of opium’s intoxicating effects. At the same time, McCallum and Browne appear open to the possibility that the pleasures of smoking opium are better compared with the effects of smoking tobacco than with taking morphine. The relatively proximal encounters of colonial science, its hybridity, being localized somewhere between Europe and the colonized sphere, made possible a more flexible, less fatalistic, conception of opium’s intoxicating effects.

Far from being a passive object of scientific inquisition, it was the local, historical particularity attached to opium smoking’s intoxicating effects that forced both groups to advance further conclusions, pulling on the seams of experimental science as it struggled to define the colonial biomedical reality. Further still, the case of opium science would seem to reflect a greater dynamic at play in colonial science, especially as it pertains to intoxicants. The story of opium science impresses how even the most private, partial, experiential dimensions of colonial subjectivity, be it intoxication or emotion more generally, become embedded in the practices of imperial science, voiced through the polycentric apparatus, methodologies, concepts and conclusions of the experimental encounter.