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The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug

The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug

In the 19th century, a magic new drug took the medical community by storm, riding a wave of scientific endeavour. But, writes Douglas Small, it wasn’t long before the dark side of this miraculous substance began to emerge

Published: March 20, 2025 at 3:45 PM

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On a drab January day in 1890, journalist Marian von Glehn made her way through the "roar and rattle" of the City of London. Her destination, squeezed in among densely packed warehouses in the Moorfields district, was a massive, grubby, utilitarian building: the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital. Behind that unpromising facade, though, von Glehn was about to witness a miracle of modern medicine.

Writing for The Leisure Hour magazine, she recounted seeing a small group of nervous patients gathering outside an operating theatre. Surrounded by powerful gas lamps, reflectors and rows of “coloured phials that would have delighted the eyes of a Dutch painter”, the hospital’s nurses began to drift quietly among their charges. Into the eyes of these patients, nurses dripped a “newly discovered... magic drug” – one that would “deaden and allay the pain” of imminent operations and “inspire their patients with courage and confidence”.

The miraculous-seeming substance being administered was cocaine – and it soon captured the imagination of the Victorian public in a way that few other drugs have done, either before or since.

Numb luck

Cocaine was first isolated and extracted from the leaves of coca plants, traditionally cultivated on the slopes of the Andes, in 1855. It gained its well-known common name in 1860. However, the drug’s discovery initially passed largely unnoticed outside the specialised realms of organic chemistry. For the first few decades, one medical writer recounted, cocaine seemed to be nothing more than an “obscure [and] useless alkaloid”.

Then, in 1884, cocaine came to the attention of medical professionals worldwide when Karl Koller, a trainee ophthalmologist in the eye surgery department of Vienna General Hospital, realised that applying the compound to the surface of the eye completely blocked any sensation of pain.

That discovery heralded the advent of a completely new class of medications: local anaesthetics. For the first time it became possible to undertake pain-free operations without resorting to more dangerous – potentially fatal – general anaesthetics such as ether and chloroform. News of the breakthrough spread quickly. Henry Power, one of the presidents of the British Medical Association, announced excitedly to a meeting of members that: “In the discovery of cocaine, a new era seems to have dawned.”

Across the Atlantic, the pioneering American neurologist Dr Leonard Corning told journalists that “Cocaine is almost as wonderful and important a discovery as electricity.” Amid the ballyhoo, the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital became the first institution in the UK to make use of the new drug, starting in the same year that Koller made his discovery.

Marian von Glehn knew that a report on this still-novel anaesthetic would fascinate her readers. “Such are the wonderful properties of the newly discovered cocaine, that the operating theatre is robbed of half of its terrors,” she wrote.

That was the theory. And von Glehn found proof of its effects when, in the children’s ward, she was cornered by a six-year-old girl – nicknamed ‘The Chattermag’ (‘chatterbox’) by hospital staff – who had recently undergone a cataract operation. The Chattermag was delighted to have remained awake throughout her surgery, even addressing the operating surgeon himself at a critical moment: “I say, Mr doctor, aren’t you a-cutting of that thing in my eye?” she said. “I know you’re a-cutting of it out, aren’t you? And it don’t hurt one bit, and I don’t mind one bit – you tell me when it’s out!”

Magic drug

Within a few months of Koller’s discovery, cocaine was established, in the words of one weekly paper, as “the magic drug which takes from the knife of surgery its pain”. Fired by such an apparently epochal breakthrough, the medical profession began hungrily searching for new ways to make use of the much-lauded substance.

The Dublin Journal of Medical Science claimed that cocaine had “secured a place in therapeutics which can scarcely be paralleled in the history of any other drug”. The Chemist and Druggist reported that “Our medical journals – almost in every issue – note some new application of cocaine, and prognosticate an unlimited utility for it.” In short order, cocaine became accepted as “an absolute necessity in every surgery and dispensary”, and its uses became “almost indefinitely multiplied”.

Aside from surgical applications – in a development that seems incredible from a modern perspective – cocaine became the basis for a multitude of home remedies and day-to-day medications. It was, according to some medical authorities, the very thing to cure a cold or flu. Dr David B Lees of St Mary’s Hospital in London advised that “a 4 per cent solution of hydrochlorate of cocaine applied to the nose by means of a camel’s hair brush gives instant relief, and [can] suffice to completely arrest a cold with- out the aid of any other remedy whatever”.

By the 1890s, the pharmaceutical company Burroughs, Wellcome & Co had launched a portable cocaine nasal spray for colds and flu that was “so small as to be easily carried in the waistcoat pocket”.

Homespun remedies

The ‘Home Notes’ sections of newspapers and journals encouraged readers to make their own “cocainised snuffs”, reputedly excellent remedies for hay fever and headcolds. One recipe called for three grains of menthol, 50 grains each of coffee and powdered sugar, and a grain and a half of cocaine. Peppermint extract could be added according to the user’s taste.

If making snuff seemed too much bother, cocaine lozenges promised to “promptly check all sea-sickness, and sickness during pregnancy”, while cocaine pastilles could alleviate a sore throat.

Marvellous medicine? A tin of late 19th-century Spanish lozenges containing cocaine. (Photo by Alamy)

“If you are a Singer, Speaker, Preacher or Teacher, clear your voice with Buxton’s Cocaine Pastilles,” suggested one advert for a product costing “1 shilling and 6 pence a box”. Coverdale’s famous Cocaine and Menthol – “The Magic Tooth- ache Reliever” – was a less-pricey option, retailing for 10 and a half pence a bottle (postage included).

Less-reputable sellers of patent medicines were also quick to recommend cocaine as a cure for “nervous debility” and general “weakness”. Brown’s Medical Company, based in Brighton, supplied an “astonishing” herbal tonic for restoring “life and vigour”, made with cocaine, powdered jurubeba (a nightshade from Brazil) and ignatia, derived from the seeds of an Asian tree. The product was, the company claimed, suitable for “either sex” but was best used to counter problems euphemistically referred to as “lost manhood”.

Intoxicating beauty

As its applications multiplied, cocaine also played a foundational role in the Victorian beauty industry. Local anaesthesia made the new field of cosmetic surgery practical in a way it never had been before. As early as 1887, it was possible for those with a sadly unfashionable “tip-tilted” nose to have the organ numbed with cocaine and resculpted into the “desired aquiline shape”. Electrolysis and hair removal also experienced a boom thanks to the new pain-relieving drug.

Women who coveted the fashionably rouged complexion of the day might have a “delicate rose colour” permanently tattooed into their cheeks – using pigment infused with cocaine to quell the pain – while men were offered a rugged-looking and never-fading tattooed suntan. Newspapers assured readers that the tattooing wasn’t in the least uncomfortable, claiming that some clients “indifferently read a book during the process”.

In a more practical application, the New York Fire Department briefly considered issuing cocaine eye drops to its firemen to protect those delicate organs and keep them “free from pain in the midst of heavy smoke”. The idea, however, quickly ran aground on the objection that “the danger of men acquiring the cocaine habit is so great as to overshadow all other considerations”.

Sherlock Holmes' dubious solution

The fictional detective's cocaine usage identified him as a man at the cutting edge of science. It may seem surprising, but Sherlock Holmes was one of the 19th century’s most famous users of cocaine. The Sign of Four, the second of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, begins with the detective in his Baker Street rooms, injecting himself with a “7 per cent solution” of the drug. One evening paper observed, three years later in 1893, that “Many people derive their practical acquaintance with cocaine from the part it plays in the career of the renowned Sherlock Holmes.” Doyle had trained to be a doctor before turning to writing full-time, so was aware of cocaine’s reputation as a wonder drug. For many Victorians, cocaine wasn’t just a remarkable discovery; its almost unprecedented power to relieve pain seemed to symbolise the vast horizons of modern science and the incredible transformations that might yet come from scientific discoveries. For one journalist writing in Victoria’s golden jubilee year, 1887 – three years after Karl Koller discovered the drug’s anaesthetic properties – “the development of the marvellous cocaine” gave “practical” proof that “the years of Queen Victoria’s reign have been crowded with glorious life”. By giving Sherlock Holmes a cocaine habit, Doyle could quickly signal to readers that his hero was something new: a thoroughly specialised, scientific detective, working at the cutting edge of Victorian innovation. (Tellingly, though, cocaine use is absent from stories after 1904.) As Doyle described his hero in later years, “Sherlock is utterly inhuman, no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect.” For Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes’s cocaine solution was a way to mark him out as the ideal problem-solver for the 19th century’s new “age of science”.

This was far from an idle concern. Less than a year after Karl Koller’s transformative discovery of cocaine anaesthesia, the first reports of cocaine addiction began to appear in the press.

In December 1885, a reporter for the Chicago Herald made his way through the cold and crowded city streets towards a “handsome” five-storey building on West Madison Street. The Washingtonian Home for Inebriates (a 19th-century term for those suffering from alcohol or drug addiction) could house 100 patients, but the reporter had come to see one man in particular.

Dr Charles Bradley may not have been the world’s first cocaine addict, but he was the first to catch the public eye. Swept up in the excitement following the discovery of cocaine anaesthesia, he had begun taking the drug experimentally. Quickly losing control of his new habit, he had fallen into a “sad” and “piteous” state. His medical practice faded away to nothing, he became violent to his friends, wife and children, and he was consumed by alternately paranoid and grandiose fantasies.

In the courtroom where he was committed to the Home for Inebriates, Bradley became suddenly frantic and rushed at the bench. “In an agony of despair,” he begged the judge “as a man and by God Almighty” to “try the cocaine” so that he might understand how wonderful it really was.

Bradley struggled with his addiction for some years. By 1887, after a long interval of “acute mania, convulsions, and every dis- tressing phase of violent insanity”, he was reported to have been “nursed back to mental and physical vigour”. Despite his travails, though, he still believed in the benefits of cocaine. “With all your experience with cocaine, how do you regard it?” a reporter asked Bradley. “I think it is a grand drug, with remarkable properties,” he replied. “Scientists are only in the experimental stage with it.”

When news of Bradley’s affliction broke – alerting the world to the problem of cocaine addiction – the British Medical Journal poetically noted that “this sweet rose of our therapeutic bouquet has its bitter thorn”.

Bradley’s conflicting experiences reflected those of the Victorian medical profession more widely, and the question of how to balance the drug’s revolutionary uses in local anaesthesia with the threat of addiction began to come to the fore. Druggist’s Circular summed up the growing concerns: “Cocaine is one of the greatest blessings to mankind. But there is a dark side to the picture. It makes a good servant, but a poor master.”

Master and servant

Towards the end of the 19th century, doctors and journalists alike became increasingly vocal about how easily cocaine might “master” an unwary user. Jocelynne Joye, one of the star journalists of The Outlook magazine, cautioned her female readers about the dangers of becoming dependent on “stimulants” to get through the social season. She described a recent encounter at a fashionable party: “A lady was heard to offer a friend a tabloid from a small silver box – just as one might offer a cigarette to another – with the words, ‘Do have one dear – they’re only cocaine. Personally, I don’t know how I should get through the day without them’.”

Health and medicine columnists echoed such sentiments. The well-known medical author William Gordon Stables cautioned his readers that, as powerful and effective as cocaine-based medicines were, “I almost dread recommending them, so terrible in its effects is the cocaine habit.”

The summer of 1889 brought cocaine’s first celebrity casualty when Aristides ‘Jacques’ Damala, husband of the world-famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, succumbed to “overdoses of morphia and cocaine” in his hotel room on the Boulevard Pereire in Paris.

A far more dramatic tragedy struck the small town of Manchester, Connecticut in 1896. Workers from the local silk mills often suffered from asthma and catarrh caused by the fine dust produced by processing raw silk. Seeking relief, many turned to a cocaine snuff sold by a local chemist. According to reports, the recipe was actually weaker than those regularly printed in newspapers, but strong enough to cause terrible problems for its users. By the time the issue was reported in newspapers, more than 40 people had become addicted to the mixture.

Responding to growing concerns about addiction, Irish psychiatrist Conolly Norman observed that “Cocaine is probably the most agreeable of all narcotics, and therefore the most dangerous.” Yet, strange as it might seem today, such accounts of the dangers and harmful effects of cocaine did little to blunt popular enthusiasm for the drug.

Among commentators who were aware of the potential addictiveness of cocaine in the late 19th century, the general attitude was that those who became addicted represented a relatively small number of tragic individuals, and that the benefits of cocaine as a therapy and as a ‘prestige’ drug for the medical profession needed to be balanced against that.

A British army dispensary on the western front during the First World War, when concerns about national health and morale prompted legislation to limit sales of cocaine. (Photo by Alamy)

It was only in the wake of the First World War, and increased anxieties about national health and civilian morale, that legislation was introduced to limit the sale of cocaine in the UK.

From 1884, doctors, journalists and legislators had wrestled with a dilemma: how to balance the promise of cocaine with its perils. The drug provides an object lesson in how scientific research can capture our imaginations and excite us with fresh possibilities – but also expose us to new and terrible risks.

Douglas Small is a historian of medicine based in the UK, and the author of Cocaine, Literature, and Culture, 1876–1930 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)

This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine