Opium Read Online Free PDF Page B

epilepsy, apoplexy, poor sight, bronchitis, asthma, coughs, the spitting of blood, colic, jaundice, hardness of the spleen, kidney stones, urinary complaints, fever, dropsy, leprosy, menstrual problems, melancholy and all other pestilences. It was he who popularised the use of one of the famous early opium concoctions, mithridate, the invention of which is accorded to Mithridates the Great. Galen advocated it to all his patients amongst whom were numbered Marcus Aurelius and the Emperors Commodus and Severus. Yet, for all his apparent quackery, Galen was a serious scientist. He studied and published his findings on the toxic effects of opium and understood the concept of tolerance – that is, the ability of the body to withstand larger and larger successive doses, requiring increasing doses to gain the same effect as time goes by.
    Like Homer, Virgil mentioned opium in his works: in both the Aencid and the Georgics it is mentioned as a soporific. His lines spargens humida melle soperiferumque paparva (giving dewy honey and soporific poppy) and Lethaeo perfusa papavera somno (poppies soaked with the sleep of Lethe) indicate very clearly the accepted capabilities of the drug. Pliny the Elder wrote that poppy seed (he was incorrect) was a useful hypnotic, whilst the poppy latex was effective in treating headaches and arthritis and in healing wounds.
    For the Romans, the poppy was a powerful symbol of sleep and death. Somnus, the god of sleep, is frequently portrayed as a small boy or sprite carrying a bunch of poppies and an opium horn, the vessel in which the juice was collected by farmers, whilst another popular image is that of a figure bending over a woman and pouring poppy juice on to her closed eyes. The poppy also formed part of the mysteries of Ceres, the Roman goddess of fertility, who resorted to the drug to relieve pain: a famous statue shows her holding a torch and poppy pods. Indeed, the poppy was so well known a symbol that, in later years of the empire, it was to be found on Roman coinage.
    The Romans viewed opium not only as a painkiller and religious drug but as a convenient poison. For the suicide, it was a pleasant means of enticing death. Hannibal was said to have kept a dose in a small chamber in his ring, finally ending his life with it in Libyssa in 183 BC . Yet its main attraction was for the murderer.
    Being easily obtained, easily disguised in food or dissolved in wine and bringing a seemingly innocent death as if in sleep, opium poisoning was an ideal assassin’s aid. According to the historian Cornelius Nepos, the son of Dionysius (the tyrant of Syracuse) arranged with the court doctors in 367 BC for his father to overdose on opium. In AD 55 Agrippina, the Emperor Claudius’s last wife, put it into the wine of her fourteen-year-old stepson, Britannicus, so her own son, Nero, might inherit the throne.
    As a medicine, opium was taken in a number of concoctions but for leisure use – as what would now be termed a ‘recreational drug’ – it was eaten often mixed with honey to suppress its bitterness.
    The eating of opium increased as the knowledge of its beneficial properties became more widely known. In the second century AD , it was stated that Lysis could take 4 drachms of poppy juice without being incommoded. To be so tolerant of the drug suggests he was a well-established addict: such a quantity would have killed a first-time imbiber.
    Curiously, neither the Greeks nor the Romans spread the use of opium throughout the whole of their domains and they did not regard opium as an international trading commodity.
    However, the Arabs did. They had used opium as a painkiller since the time of the Egyptians and it was the Arabs who developed and organised the production of, and trade in, opium which has existed ever since.
    By the ninth century, Arab scholars and medical men were publishing texts on af-yum (or ufian or asiun ), as opium was known, and its preparations. The