CHLORAL AND OTHER NARCOTICS. 495 



touched, the sick man was in a deep sleep during which the operation 

 was performed without the consciousness of feeling, not to say of pain. 

 The sleep would last for some hours. From this purely medical or sur- 

 gical use of morion, the application of it extended. Those who were 

 condemned to die by cruel and prolonged torture were permitted to 

 taste its beneficence and to pass from their consummate agony through 

 Lethe's walk to death. A little later and the wine of mandragora was 

 sought after for other and less commendable purposes. There were 

 those who drank of it for taste or pleasure ; and who were spoken of 

 as " mandragorites," as we might speak of alcoholics or chloralists. 

 They passed into the land of sleep and dream, and waking up in scare 

 and alarm were the screaming mandrakes of an ancient civilization. 



I have myself made the " morion " of that civilization, have dis- 

 pensed the prescription of Dioscorides and Pliny. The same chemist, 

 Mr. Hanbury, who first put chloral into my hands for experiment, also 

 procured for me the root of the true mandragora. From that root I 

 made the morion, tested it on myself, tried its effects, and re-proved, 

 after a lapse of perhaps four or five centuries, that it had all the prop- 

 erties originally ascribed to it. That it should have come into use as 

 a narcotic by those who first tasted it for its narcotic action, and that 

 they should have passed into mandragorites, is not more surprising than 

 that other and later members of the human family should have become 

 chloralists. The effects produced by morion subjectively and objec- 

 tively are so much like those from chloral that they may be counted 

 practically as the same. I have put these two examples of the action 

 of two similar toxic agents in parallel positions, because they are re- 

 markable as showing how, at most distant and distinct eras of civili- 

 zation, a general practice in the use of these agents sprang out of a 

 special practice relating to their use, a maleficent out of a beneficent 

 purpose. If I wished to extend the comparison, I might place opium, 

 ether, chloroform, and chlorodyne under the same category. 



Mandragora, opium, chloral, ether, chloroform, chlorodyne, are 

 medical agents used in the first instance mechanical^, and used in a 

 second instance socially, and by habit in certain instances, for the pur- 

 pose of making the mind oblivious, or, in other and more frequently 

 used words, for securing repose or rest. These agents do not stand 

 alone in respect to the list of toxicants which are assumed to be useful 

 to mankind. To them must be added many others which have not 

 necessarily had an origin from medical science or art, but have sprung 

 into general use from their first application. Under this head may be 

 included the commoner members of the chemical families known as 

 the alcohols : hasheesh from the Canabis indica (Indian hemp), yerba 

 de nuaca, or red-thorn apple, almanitine, coca, absinthe, arsenic, to- 

 bacco. 



It will be seen that the toxical agents are a numerous class, and, 

 if I had chosen to refine, I might have added some further. In one 



