MESCAL: A STUDY OF A DIVINE PLANT. 7* 



condition the less likely is he to experience any unpleasant results from 

 taking mescal. 



It was inevitable that an attempt should be made to drag mescal into 

 the already overcrowded field of therapeutical agents. Curiously 

 enough, the first affection which it was used to treat was neurasthenia, 

 and the results were said to be good, but nothing further has been heard 

 of it. In various quarters it has been suggested for use in insanity, and 

 at Carmarthen Asylum Dr. Goodall, as he informs me, has made many 

 trials with it, on melancholic and stuporose patients, pushing the drug 

 eventually in large doses, but beyond dilatation of pupils and rapidity 

 of heart action, the results were nil. I have myself never felt hopeful 

 about mescal as a therapeutic agent, and though it is possible that of 

 the various alkaloids obtained from it some may be found useful, it is 

 not easy to see in what diseased conditions the crude drug itself is 

 indicated. The fact that its best results are obtained in perfectly 

 healthy individuals would alone counter-indicate its use as a remedial 

 agent, and at present there seems no excuse whatever for thrusting it 

 into the pharmacopoeia. 



The chief interest of mescal is for the physiologist and the psychol- 

 ogist.* It may be added that for every healthy person a single 

 experience, at all events, of what mescal has to teach would be an 

 educational advantage of no little value. As one of my subjects, who 

 strongly feels this educational value of mescal though he has no wish 

 to repeat the experience, remarks : "The connection between the normal 

 condition of my body and my intelligence had broken — my body had 

 become in a measure a stranger to my reason — so that on reasserting 

 itself it seemed, with reference to my reason which had remained per- 

 fectly sane and alert, for a moment sufficiently unfamiliar for me to 

 become conscious of its individual and peculiar character. It was as 

 if I had unexpectedly attained an objective knowledge of my own per- 

 sonality." Thus it is that the Indians who raised this remarkable plant 

 to divine rank, and dedicated to it a cult, have in some measure beer 

 justified, and even in civilization there remains some place for the rites 

 of mescal. 



* ' What an excellent use for a medical congress/ Mr. Francis Galton 

 writes to me, ' to put one half of the members under mescal, and to make the 

 other half observe them.' 



