Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/511

Rh 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 surgical 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 dispensed 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 properties 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 objectively 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 remarkable as showing how, at most distant and distinct eras of civilization, 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 mechanically, and used in a second instance socially, and by habit in certain instances, for the purpose 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, tobacco.

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