In this context it is easier to see why, at the time, cocaine looked like such a technological marvel. Cocaine could easily eliminate pain by being rubbed onto a part of the body or being injected via hypodermic, and do so without the fearful prospects of unconsciousness and death.
Koller’s discovery offered a solution to the 19th century’s pain problem. One GP from the small Scottish town of Garlieston declared that: “There are many people who dread chloroform so much, that they decline to take it, unless practically coerced into doing so.” If doctors were cautious of general anaesthesia, then patients were often even more so. Is it not time to discard the lethal chloroform, and thus put an end to the human sacrifice that is weekly offered on altar?” “The records of death by chloroform,” he wrote, “are monstrous in their frequency. In 1894 Dr J McNamara penned a somewhat melodramatic letter on the subject to the British Medical Journal. The danger of anaesthetic death was a consistent presence in the minds of surgeons and patients alike. General anaesthetics like chloroform and ether had been used successfully for almost 40 years by the time cocaine entered the public consciousness, but these methods came with several problems – not the least of which was the worry that those who went under chloroform might never wake up. We live, after all, in a world where surgical pain relief is taken as a given, but late-19th-century options for anaesthesia were considerably more limited and problematic. It’s hard for us now to grasp why cocaine anaesthesia provoked this type of rapturous (even religious) response. In the first six months of 1885, over 60 articles on cocaine appeared in the pages of the British Medical Journal. News of the discovery spread rapidly through Europe and America, provoking ecstatic reactions from medical professionals and the public alike. In 1884 a young Viennese ophthalmologist named Karl Koller discovered that a mild solution of cocaine would, if introduced into the eye, deaden the nerves’ sensitivity to pain. Before the harmful consequences of cocaine addiction were fully understood, cocaine was celebrated as a revolutionary medical technology: the first effective local anaesthetic. In the late 19th century, though, cocaine had a very different set of associations, which are largely forgotten about today. The spectacular wealth and self-annihilation of Tony Montana in the 1983 film ‘Scarface’, the National Crime Agency’s ‘ Every Line Counts’ campaign, and Sadiq Khan’s condemnation of gang violence fuelled by “middle-class cocaine parties” all depict cocaine as simultaneously indulgent and destructive – the vice of the affluent. In the modern popular consciousness, cocaine is usually defined by images of extravagance, violence and addiction.
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