Opium, Experimentation, and Alterity in France

Abstract

AbstractThe effects and dangers of opium were subject to intense scientific scrutiny and experimentation in Paris in the decades around 1700, as rival networks of healers contended for commercial advantage over the compound drugs that contained it. Opium, widely consumed in the Ottoman empire, became a subject of European scientific interest in an attempt to render it safe, agreeable, and beneficial for European bodies. Apothecaries sought to resurrect an ancient drug and infuse it with new life in the laboratory; physicians conducted chemical experiments upon it. Yet it was hard to reach agreement as to opium's harmful or beneficial effects; some aspects of its nature proved impossible to ‘domesticate’ in the same way as other exotic drugs like coffee or tea, or even cinchona. I argue that only by investigating the discrete networks which sold and experimented upon opium can the historian account for the ways in which this drug generated social, political, and financial capital for experimenters as it circulated throughout society.