Psychopharmacology in British

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Psychopharmacology
in British Literature and
Culture, 1780–1900

Edited by
Natalie Roxburgh
Jennifer S. Henke
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK

Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new
series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas
in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine.
Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot
books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in
conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will
cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and
emerging topics as well as established ones.

Editorial Board
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and
Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony
Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University,
USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, Univer-
sity of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613
 Natalie Roxburgh · Jennifer S. Henke
Editors

Psychopharmacology
in British Literature
and Culture,
1780–1900
Editors
Natalie Roxburgh Jennifer S. Henke
University of Siegen University of Bremen
Siegen, Germany Bremen, Germany

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

ISBN 978-3-030-53597-1 ISBN 978-3-030-53598-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53598-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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 Praise for Psychopharmacology in
British Literature and Culture,
1780–1900

“This pioneering study of drug effects, not just addiction, in the nine-
teenth century ranges from opium to alcohol, lavender water, wormwood,
and other herbal substances. Roxburgh and Henke have done a service
for the fields of both medical humanities and literature and science by
revealing the important role literary and cultural texts played in making
possible the emergence of psychopharmacology in the next century.”
—Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan Professor and Director of the Curb
Center, Vanderbilt University, USA

“This collection offers useful consideration of the history of late-

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pharmacology; its essays suggest all
kinds of possibilities for new conversations about medical science and the
literary imagination.”
—Adam Colman, author of Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in
Nineteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

v
 Contents

1 Situating Psychopharmacology in Literature

and Culture 1
Natalie Roxburgh and Jennifer S. Henke

Part I Drugs and Genre

2 Historicising Keats’ Opium Imagery Through

Neoclassical Medical and Literary Discourses 23
Octavia Cox

3 “Grief’s Comforter, Joy’s Guardian, Good King

Poppy!”: Opium and Victorian Poetry 47
Irmtraud Huber

4 Dangerous Literary Substances: Discourses of Drugs

and Dependence in the Nineteenth-Century Sensation
Novel Debates 69
Sarah Frühwirth

vii
viii CONTENTS

Part II Rethinking the Pharmacological Body: Drugs and

the Borders of the Human

5 Blurring Plant and Human Boundaries: Erasmus

Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants 93
C. A. Vaughn Cross

6 Pharmacokinetics and Opium-Eating: Metabolites,

Stomach Aches and the Afterlife of De Quincey’s
Addiction 117
Hannah Markley

7 A Posthumanist Approach to Agency in De Quincey’s

Confessions 135
Anna Rowntree

Part III The Cultural Politics of Known Drug Effects

8 Reading De Quinceyan Rhetoric Against the Grain:

An Actor-Network-Theory Approach 155
Anuj Gupta

9 Blood Streams, Cash Flows and Circulations

of Desire: Psychopharmacological Knowledge About
Opium in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Fiction 171
Nadine Böhm-Schnitker

10 The Indeterminate Pharmacology of Absinthe

in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Beyond 195
Vanessa Herrmann
 CONTENTS ix

Part IV Historicising the Prescription: Medication and

Self-Medication

11 “She Furnishes the Fan and the Lavender Water”:

Nervous Distress, Female Healers and Jane Austen’s
Herbal Medicine 217
Rebecca Spear

12 “When Poor Mama Long Restless Lies, / She Drinks

the Poppy’s Juice”: Opium and Gender in British
Romantic Literature 241
Joseph Crawford

13 Middlemarch and Medical Practice in the Regency

Era: From “Bottles of Stuff” to the Clinical Gaze 263
Björn Bosserhoff

Index 287
 Notes on Contributors

Nadine Böhm-Schnitker (PD Dr.) is an Assistant Professor (Oberassis-

tentin) in British and American Studies at the University of Bielefeld.
She specialises in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Studies and has recently
completed the manuscript for a monograph titled Senses and Sensations:
Towards an Aesthetics of the Victorian Novel. Apart from researching
hunger, her current projects deal with the cultural legacy of the Opium
Wars, neo-Victorian negotiations of class and inheritance and practices of
comparison in the long eighteenth century.
Björn Bosserhoff (Ph.D.) is a Research Associate at the University of
Bonn’s North American Studies Program as well as a freelance academic
editor and translator. He is the author of Radical Contra-Diction:
Coleridge, Revolution, Apostasy (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), a book that
re-evaluates S.T. Coleridge’s political trajectory from ‘radical’ to ‘conser-
vative’. With Sabine Sielke, he has co-edited the volumes Nostalgia: Imag-
ined Time-Spaces in Global Media Cultures (Peter Lang, 2016) and New
York, New York! Urban Spaces, Dreamscapes, Contested Territories (Peter
Lang, 2015). His research interests include the social and cultural history
of the British long nineteenth century, American history and politics, art
history, religious history, the history of psychiatry, addiction theory, the
history of feminism and queer studies.
Octavia Cox received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, and
she now teaches and researches at the University of Nottingham and

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

University of Oxford. She has published on women’s writing in The

Lady’s Poetical Magazine (1781–82) and on post-colonial implications of
the Reverse-Robinsonade genre in The Woman of Colour (1808). She is
currently writing her first monograph, Alexander Pope in the Romantic
Age.
Joseph Crawford is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the
University of Exeter. He is the author of four books: Raising Milton’s
Ghost (2011), Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013), The
Twilight of the Gothic (2014) and Inspiration and Insanity in British
Poetry (2019). His current research deals with the literature of the British
post-Romantic period.
Sarah Frühwirth is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Vienna,
Austria. In 2015, she received a prestigious three-year research fellowship
for her Ph.D. project “Free Will and Determinism in the British Sensa-
tion Novel of the 1860s and 1870s”, which investigates to what extent
the sensation novelists’ depiction of free will and determinism was influ-
enced by contemporary scientific and philosophical discourses. In 2018,
she became the reviews editor of The Wilkie Collins Journal. Her research
interests include sensation fiction, nineteenth-century fiction in general,
the history of medicine and science and food studies.
Anuj Gupta is a Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at the
University of Arizona (USA) as of 2020. Gupta took his M.Phil. in
English Literature and Cultural Studies from the Centre of English
Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and was Assistant Director
of the Young India Fellowship’s Critical Writing programme at Ashoka
University (both in India). His work emphasises the way rhetoric shapes
our understanding of science and sociocultural phenomena.
Dr. Jennifer S. Henke is an Assistant Professor at the University of
Bremen, Germany. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Anglophone literature
and culture with a book on gender and space in contemporary Shake-
speare films (Unsex Me Here, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 2014). Since
2013, she has been a member of the interdisciplinary and international
research group Fiction Meets Science in cooperation with the Univer-
sities of Hamburg, Oldenburg, Bielefeld, Sydney, San Luis Potosi and
Guelph. Her research and teaching activities include literatures of addic-
tion, science and the media, gender and mathematics, Irish politics,
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

medical humanities, body studies, gender and science-fiction, posthu-

manism as well as Frankenstein in literature and film. She is currently
working on her second book that deals with medicine and the pregnant
female body in eighteenth-century literature and culture.
Vanessa Herrmann holds two MAs (2004 and 2019) and a Ph.D.
(2011) from the University of Siegen and is currently a Lecturer at the
University of Bremen. Her dissertation Shakespeare Reloaded: The Shake-
speare Renaissance 1989–2004 was published in 2011 (Wissenschaftlicher
Verlag Trier). Her most recent publications include “Adaptation as
City Branding: The Case of Dexter and Miami” in the collection
Where is Adaptation? Mapping Cultures, Texts, and Contexts (Eds. Casie
Hermansson and Janet Zepernick; John Benjamins Publishing Company,
2018). Her research interests are adaptation and game studies as well as
Victorian literature and culture.
Irmtraud Huber is a Lecturer in the English Department of the
Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich and an Associated Postdoc-
toral Fellow of the Walter Benjamin Kolleg, University of Bern. With
support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, she has held Visiting
Fellowships at Columbia University, at the University of Cambridge and
at Queen Mary College, University of London. She has published two
monographs on contemporary fiction, Literature After Postmodernism
(Palgrave, 2014) and Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction
(Palgrave, 2016). She has also guest-edited a special edition of EJES on
Poetry, Science and Technology with Wolfgang Funk. Her research inter-
ests include time in literature, the epistemology of literary form and the
theory of lyric. Her current research focuses on (re)configurations of time
in Victorian poetry.
Hannah Markley is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work has appeared in European
Romantic Review, Essays in Romanticism (Taylor & Francis) and Parallax
(Taylor & Francis). Her current book project takes as its point of depar-
ture the nineteenth-century fascination with sisters as mourners to show
how authors of the period use female bodies to construct gendered visions
of survival in an ecologically precarious world.
Anna Rowntree (M.A.) is a freelance writer and yoga teacher based in
Berlin, Germany.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Natalie Roxburgh (Ph.D. 2011, Rutgers) is a Lecturer and Research

Fellow in English Literary Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany.
Her current book-in-progress is on rethinking aesthetic disinterestedness
in nineteenth-century Britain. She has published widely on a variety of
topics—such as science, economics and politics—from the seventeenth
century to the present, including a monograph titled Representing Public
Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and the Rise of the Financial
Subject (Routledge, 2016). Her work can be read in Eighteenth-Century
Fiction, Mosaic and many other places. She currently has three essays out
on the rise of psychopharmacology in contemporary fiction and film, two
of which are published by Palgrave.
Rebecca Spear is completing her Ph.D. at Cardiff University. Her thesis
explores Jane Austen’s interactions with science, focusing on medicine
and botany. She has a B.A. (Hons) from the University of South Wales
and an M.A. from Cardiff University, both in English Literature. Since
2015, she has been an editorial assistant for the Journal of Literature and
Science. Her research interests are women’s writing of the long eighteenth
century, literature and science, Romanticism and the history of psychiatry.
C. A. Vaughn Cross (Ph.D. in History, Auburn University) is an Assis-
tant Professor in the Department of Geography and Sociology at Samford
University where she teaches interdisciplinary courses involving the
history of technology and culture, religion, sex and gender. She has
published articles in Social Sciences & Missions, The Indian Journal of
American Studies and Perspectives in Religious Studies as well as in
the anthologies North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914: Theology,
Theory, and Policy (Ed. Wilbert R Shenk; William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2004) and Transhumanism and the Church: Chips in the Brain,
Immortality, and the World of Tomorrow (Eds. Steve Donaldson and Ron
Cole-Turner; Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
 CHAPTER 1

Situating Psychopharmacology
in Literature and Culture

Natalie Roxburgh and Jennifer S. Henke

In the last decades, scholars have become increasingly interested in the

role psychoactive substances play in the making of and expression of
human culture. Given the proliferation of documentaries, news items
and political debates on decriminalisation in recent years, it is perhaps
no wonder that drugs have become a focal point of scholarly concern.
Indeed, in the public spotlight are issues such as the off-label (over-)use of
medication, the proliferation of opioid addiction (the ‘opioid epidemic’)
in the last decade through over-prescription in the United States and a
scientific and cultural reassessment of real risks that both legal and illegal
drugs pose. Such topics, despite their more recent political, social and

N. Roxburgh (B)
University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]
J. S. Henke
University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 1

N. Roxburgh and J. S. Henke (eds.), Psychopharmacology
in British Literature and Culture, 1780–1900, Palgrave Studies
in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53598-8_1
2 N. ROXBURGH AND J. S. HENKE

cultural resonances, have been salient for centuries, at least insofar as they
appear in literary and cultural texts.1
This volume historicises the way medical and scientific knowledge came
to provide systematic accounts of how drugs work by honing the way they
are represented in literary and cultural texts, which challenge, anticipate,
interrogate, participate in and criticise their medical counterparts. Most
studies on drugs in literature and culture have focused on the history of
addiction, and many have used literary biography as the main source texts
(Milligan 1995, 2005; Davenport-Hines 2001; Boon 2002; Redfield and
Brodie 2002; Ronell 2004; Reed 2006; Zieger 2008; Jay 2011; Comitini
2012; Mangiavellano 2013; Foxcroft 2016; Malek), often focusing on
Thomas De Quincey (Abrams 1971; Schiller 1976; Rzepka 1991; Clej
1995; Morrison and Roberts 2008; Morrison 2011). There is, however,
much more to be said about psychoactive substances and the connections
human beings have to them. As Susan Zieger points out, the expansion of
international trade meant that people “became enchanted with marvelous
substances from exotic locales: spices, sugar, tobacco, chocolate, coffee,
tea, rum. Imperial commerce in the period from 1500 to 1800 laid the
groundwork for a ‘psychoactive revolution’” (4). During this period, and
especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, knowledge about
how drugs work on the brain, nerves and the body increased, and with
this knowledge came a process of identifying and restricting their use.
Breaking also from a tendency to emphasise the way writers used drugs
as reflected in literary biography, this volume examines what contempo-
raries knew about how drugs affect the body, and what effects they have
on mood, sensation, thinking and behaviour, in order to contribute to
the discourse on addiction as well as to consider the cultural significance
of psychoactive substances beyond addiction. There were, after all, many
ways to use substances that were not based on drug-induced need.
The nineteenth century is a fascinating time to study drugs precisely
because of the convergence of different medicines. One need only reflect
on the experience of chemist Humphry Davy, who records his experimen-
tation with nitrous oxide, stumbling his way into his own notion of the
substance’s effects and its subsequent use: “My labours are finished for
the season as to public experimenting and enunciation. My last lecture
was on Saturday evening. Nearly 500 persons attended, and amongst

1 We would like to thank Norbert Schaffeld, Imke Grothenn and the Bremen English
Studies Colloquium for support and feedback on this project.
 1 SITUATING PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 3

other philosophers, your countryman, Professor Pictet. There was respira-

tion, nitrous oxide, and unbounded applause—Amen. To-morrow a party
of philosophers meet at the Institution, to inhale the joy-inspiring gas.
It has produced a great sensation” (Davy 1858, 64). Experimentation
with nitrous oxide (and a careful observation of its effects) led to the
conclusion that the gas could function as an anesthetic drug: “Does not
sensibility more immediately depend on respiration? […] As nitrous oxide
in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain,
it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in
which no great effusion of blood takes place” (Davy 1858, 18). Indeed,
as Davy’s experimentation shows, the nineteenth century was rife with
attempts to ascertain particular effects of particular substances, which
were put to use in an increasingly systematised way.
Coined by the pharmacologist David Macht in 1920, the term
psychopharmacology is usually associated with the scientific study of drugs
and their capacity to treat mental disorders. In this volume, we use
the term to discuss the representation of drugs in late-eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century literary and cultural contexts: contemporaries hypoth-
esised about what might now be called drug action (even though in
this time, drugs were thought to affect the body) and explored util-
ising certain substances for particular known drug effects . Our book
differentiates itself from what has already been published on drugs in
literature and culture by considering the role emergent psychopharma-
cological knowledges play in literary and cultural texts during the period
when the field slowly began to develop. Nineteenth-century science was
growing, dynamic and controversial—and with no separate concepts of
psychology or psychiatry to speak of. The history of known drug effects
dovetails with the development of others fields. The nineteenth century
is crucial for the history of psychiatric medicine, for the development of a
theory of addiction and also for a theory of drug effect that moves beyond
humouralism.
Abandoning humouralist theories of the body that posited nerve
system as tubes of liquids (which left little room for a theory of drug
effect), these new methods included new materialist medical theories
that afforded mechanical agency to inert substances. Many embraced an
organicist materialist view of the body (see Ruston 2012, 24). One such
theory was that of Brunonianism, which scholars such as Gavin Budge
and Roy Porter have emphasised were influential on the development
4 N. ROXBURGH AND J. S. HENKE

of medicine in general and psychiatry in particular (Budge 2013, 12–

13, 56–57; Porter 1988, 89). Scottish physician John Brown posited that
afflictions were the body’s nervous reaction to external stimuli caused by
an under- or over-stimulation, dividing diseases into two classes, asthenic
and sthenic, respectively. Drugs, and especially opium, were considered
to be stimulants used to bring users back to a healthy state of equilib-
rium. Owing to Brown’s influence on figures such as Thomas Beddoes
(who, in turn, was a great influence on Samuel Taylor Coleridge)—as
well as to the Opium Wars (1839–1860)—opium takes up a lot of space
in this volume as it takes centre stage in the development of the science
of drug effects. At the same time, alcohol, tea, tobacco and other herbal
substances became increasingly relevant for medical knowledge. While the
focus is on Britain, several of our essays show how Britain is interwoven
with colonial contexts. Several of our essays address the impact of the
Opium Wars, revealing a global circulation of drugs as well as colonial
contexts for the known effects that go with them.
Studying psychopharmacology in the context of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century literature encompasses three areas: (1) considering
what was known about the human brain, nerves and body, (2) accounting
for contemporary knowledges about substances (usually plant-based) and
(3) studying the manner in which literary texts represent how the use of
drugs is embedded in specific cultural contexts. In what ways were drugs
seen as empowering, healing or detrimental? What were the cultural—or
even aesthetic—contexts for this assessment? How do these factors inflect
the way substances are experienced? We address these questions in our
four sections. First, our contributors examine the question of the aesthetic
by looking at the relationship between genre and drugs. Second, we
consider the way psychopharmacology in its cultural contexts puts pres-
sure on a strict division between humans and drugs, and also humans and
plants. Third, we assess the cultural and political influences that inform the
way that known drug effects were described, discussed, classified and put
to use. Finally, we conclude by examining early frameworks and attitudes
towards medication and self-medication, thinking about the emergence
of the prescription in literary texts.
Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture asks the ques-
tion about what recent science and medicine say about drugs, and it
historicises this knowledge with what contemporaries knew and thought
about them. People take drugs for a variety of reasons: for medicine,
 1 SITUATING PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 5

for pleasure, for relieving withdrawal symptoms or for enhancing certain

qualities for particular social or cultural ends. That is to say, the relation-
ship between how drugs work on the brain (drug action) and how people
think and feel while taking drugs (drug effects) is complex when we
consider cultural contexts. And what we learn from literature cannot be
deduced from a medical textbook alone. This book aims at extending the
socio-historical investigations that concentrate on the discovery of drugs
in the context of the history of psychopharmacology, on the boundaries
between use and abuse in society, on the distribution and sale of (medic-
inal) drugs, on the drug trade and drug wars and on the way in which
economic considerations have affected the determination of ‘good’, ‘bad’
or ‘forbidden’ drugs (Porter and Teich 1995; Drews 2000; Courtwright
2001; Curth 2006; Wallis 2012; Barbara 2015). Drugs are, first and fore-
most, material objects with specific chemical attributes that have particular
benefits and/or detrimental effects depending on specific contexts. Our
focus is on the drug itself, in whatever form the substance takes, an
approach that factors in the way these chemicals were thought to work
on the brain and/or body. Despite this volume’s general focus on opium,
examining several drugs in depth allows us to see that different cultural
imaginaries of different drugs inform the way that they are interpreted. In
so doing, articles in this collection add to the discussion by considering
the way drug effects were thought to enable or enhance certain mental
states and functions in various cultural contexts. In the end, this volume
tells a story about the way a knowing use of drugs helped users become fit,
or unfit, for certain social and cultural aims. Certainly, the early science
of other drugs not emphasised in this volume—such as cocaine, which
(as one gleans from the oeuvre of Arthur Conan Doyle) became popular
at the end of the century when our volume closes—can also be better
understood through the story we are telling (see Small 2016).
Readers will discover that essays here are located at the intersec-
tions of medical humanities and literature and science. Studies in the
medical humanities have considered both the objective knowledge about
the brain and body and the subjective experiences of being ill as well
as changing discourses on madness and an ethics of prescribing drugs
(Weber 2006; Petryna et al. 2006; Racine and Forlini 2010; Franke et al.
2015; Maier and Schaub 2015; Svenaeus 2017; Malleck 2020). In liter-
ature and science, interest in neuroscience and neurology (Stiles 2007;
Walezak 2018; Servitje 2018) has been sparked by questions regarding
the relationship between the brain (as part of the body) and the mind, the
6 N. ROXBURGH AND J. S. HENKE

latter of which is represented in literature. Similarly, research in botany has

provoked new understandings of the way plants were classified, used (by
whom and with what social, geopolitical or colonial effects) and conveyed
in literature (Schiebinger 2005, 2007, 2017; Campbell 2007; Martin
2011; Francia and Stobart 2015). Finally, research on drugs as chemical
substances has explored the way people in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries thought about and understood the relationship between the
material brain and the subjective experiences attached to it, whether drugs
were and are taken owing to addiction, for medicine, for pleasure or for
spiritual reasons (Vice et al. 1994; Partridge 2018). The essays in this
volume attempt to weave some of these threads together by starting with
the drug substance itself. Our project is not to comprehensively study
all drugs used in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; rather, we
examine the way knowledge about drugs in general is woven into cultural
texts. Alcohol, tea, various herbs and wormwood are some of the drugs
explored here in addition to opium.
In literary studies, a lot of attention has been given to the concept of
the pharmakon made especially relevant by Jacques Derrida in his 1981
reading of Plato’s Phaedrus in Disseminations . Meaning poison as well as
remedy, at first glance the term seems contradictory (Derrida 1981, 97).
The question of ‘what is a pharmakon’—a remedy or poison—is related
to the role of science in society, as it is about identifying ‘good’ versus
‘bad’ drugs (see Herlinghaus 2018). After all, it is medical science that
creates a taxonomy of illnesses and remedies, which in turn has cultural
values and practices connected to them. This is something that literary
texts capture, as they seek to represent the experience of drug-taking with
science and cultural contexts attached, a task that medical literatures or
science textbooks are not able to undertake by themselves. Our study
distinguishes itself from the Derridean—and poststructuralist—tradition
by taking the science of drugs quite literally: the pharmakon is, in the true
sense of the word, a drug that can be a poison or a remedy, and it is not
merely a stand-in for technology writ large (cf. Pies 2006; Stiegler 2011;
Jenkins 2011; De Boever 2013). Another aspect that sets our volume
apart from others is the consideration of the blurred boundaries between
not only poison and remedy but also the drug as corrector and enhancer.
It is pharmacological knowledge that helps to sort drugs into categories,
which in turn have cultural influences and ramifications.
 1 SITUATING PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 7

Late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary texts analysed here

do not all explicitly deal with the discourses of modern psychopharma-
cology, as this field is still very much in development. And yet, each
essay explores the effects of drugs on the human brain and body in a
way that would have been seen as adding to knowledge in a period in
which psychopharmacology was still discovering itself: literary texts both
anticipate and produce what will come next. Thus, this collection reads
late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature through what we now
know about psychopharmacology while also rethinking the relevance of
these literary texts for the development of the field.

Drugs and Genre

In some cases, a drug’s established psychopharmacological effects were
historically linked to how texts in various genres explained to the reading
public how these effects come about. Although various plants were
explored and represented in literature from the seventeenth to the nine-
teenth century, the most prevalent drug given literary treatment was
opium, although alcohol’s effects also garnered attention. Octavia Cox’s
“Historicising Keats’ Opium Imagery through Neoclassical Medical and
Literary Discourses” sets the stage for our volume by tracing the way
opium was represented over the course of several centuries by focusing
on two distinct genres: medical texts and literary ones. She draws from
classical and neoclassical discussions of opium in order to contextu-
alise divergent understandings of the drug by the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries when John Keats wrote his well-known poetry
under the influence. By contrast to understandings of opium’s drug
effects that gained popularity in the early nineteenth century, such as
those of John Brown or Thomas De Quincey, many writing during
the period (including and especially Keats) still relied on classical and
neoclassical understandings of the drug. This chapter explores ways in
which drug-effect imagery in long-eighteenth-century medical books and
poetry overlapped, presenting opium as inhibiting activity in both body
and mind, specifically in the form of indolence, drowsiness, dulling and
forgetfulness.
Irmtraud Huber’s “‘Grief’s comforter, Joy’s guardian, good King
Poppy!’: Opium and Victorian Poetry” considers questions of literary
form alongside references to debates over the known drug effects of
opium. She references debates stemming from contemporary medical
8 N. ROXBURGH AND J. S. HENKE

texts, which disagreed about whether opium should be considered what

they called a ‘stimulant’ (as in the case of most readings of Brown’s
system) or a narcotic. Huber argues that Victorian poetry paints a picture
of attitudes towards the drug that differ from those that have emerged
from many critical discussions of Victorian narrative fiction. She suggests
that there might be a link between the cultural shift that increasingly priv-
ileged narrative fiction over poetry during the nineteenth century on the
one hand and the rise of a discourse of addiction on the other. Drawing
on authors such as Alfred Tennyson as well as less familiar figures, she
locates this link in the way in which poetry and narrative fiction—and
the novel in particular—invest to a different degree in the idea of the
autonomous, rational individual who is in control of her or his actions
and desires. Such a perspective highlights a genre politics that can be
seen to lie at the heart of different literary attitudes towards the drug.
Narrative fiction and lyric poetry thus may be said to show affinities with
different aspects or interpretations of the drug’s known effects.
In “Dangerous Literary Substances: Discourses of Drugs and Depen-
dence in the Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel Debates”, Sarah
Frühwirth shows that understanding drugs and their effects in the nine-
teenth century went hand-in-hand with a heightened awareness of their
potential dangers and habit-forming qualities, leading also to widespread
public concern. Nineteenth-century public anxieties not only centred on
psychoactive substances—in particular, opium and alcohol—but also on
other kinds of consumables: books. Owing to their sensational content
and their alleged unhealthy effect on readers, sensation novels came under
fire from all sides. In order to discredit the genre, reviewers frequently
compared sensation fiction to opium and alcohol in order to refigure their
readers as addicts. Similar to anti-drug campaigners, critics of sensation
fiction focused on the pharmacodynamics of drugs in order to illus-
trate the dangers they posed to the reader’s health and moral integrity,
noting symptoms such as sweating, an increased heart and breathing rate
and mental excitement as well as pointing to possible long-term adverse
effects. Frühwirth further argues that, similar to the concerns voiced by
anti-drug or anti-alcohol campaigners, reviewers’ fears regarding ‘drug
effects’ of this particular literary genre were not limited to individual
bodies but also extended to the social and national body. In this light,
the reviewers’ recourse to the language of drug effect and addiction in
their criticism of sensation fiction can be seen as an elaborate discursive
 1 SITUATING PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 9

strategy that enabled them to voice a wide variety of anxieties concerning

social and national stability.

Rethinking the Pharmacological Body:

Drugs and the Borders of the Human
In “Blurring Plant and Human Boundaries: Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves
of the Plants ”, C. A. Vaughn Cross explores Erasmus Darwin’s role in
the development of Western psychopharmacological knowledge. His first
major literary work The Loves of the Plants , a poem which discussed drug
experimentation, was published in 1789 and revised in 1792 as a literary
jigsaw puzzle for non-specialists. This essay considers how Darwin’s amal-
gamation of old and new paradigms of knowledge about plants, minerals
and animal bodies sought to educate the public about potential pleasures,
dangers and overall value of psychoactive substances, arguing that right
use of various plants could contribute to the civic good, exploring the way
drugs facilitate human and plant-interconnection alike. A popular health
paradigm among Darwin’s network of Edinburgh-trained physicians was
Brunonianism, which looked for over- or under-stimulated, blocked or
depleted nervous energy. One of several significant attempts of the era
to advance knowledge of drug efficacy, Darwin’s work stood out from
contemporaries’ efforts by combining Linnaeus’ classificatory system with
French naturalism, sensationalism, hermeticism and his own Baconian
experiments and theories of psychophysiology. From recipes rendering
single psychoactive entities edible to suggestive groupings of complex
admixtures of liqueurs, gasses and powders containing psilocin, opiates
or eugenol, The Loves of the Plants contains Darwin’s prescriptions
for health and happiness by interacting with psychoactive—‘affecting’—
substances, including warnings about doses and lethality. While the essay
addresses Darwin’s better-known contributions to opium use, it also takes
into account his view of more than ninety potential drugs and new drug
technologies such as pipes, chimneys and syringes for ingesting drugs such
as cannabis, mushrooms and various forms of alcohol.
While figures such as John Brown, Thomas Beddoes and Thomas
De Quincey had a lasting impact on how the public came to under-
stand opium in particular, from today’s perspective, such accounts of
how opium works on the brain and the body are technically incorrect.
In “Pharmacokinetics and Opium-Eating: Metabolites, Stomach Aches
10 N. ROXBURGH AND J. S. HENKE

and the Afterlife of De Quincey’s Addiction”, Hannah Markley relies on

current psychopharmacological understandings of how drugs act and, in
turn, are acted on by the body to produce drug effects, drawing attention
to the entanglement of action and effect (and of drug and human body)
in modern scientific discussions of drugs. By focusing on the ways opiates
are metabolised by the body, Markley argues that, despite his technically
flawed accounts, De Quincey’s rhetoric of ‘opium-eating’ in Confessions
(1821) ironically anticipates current psychopharmacological explanations
of how bodies and drugs interact to produce what is understood as a
drug effect. Hence, recent psychopharmacological descriptions of drugs
and their metabolisation help to confirm De Quincey’s descriptions of
the bilateral relationship between the opium user, or ‘eater’, and the drug
itself. In this context, De Quincey’s physical dependence is, in fact, the
result of a complex entanglement of the mind, the body and the drug
as they interact with prior maladies, eating habits and the consumption
of other substances such as alcohol. Markley emphasises the interaction
between opium and the stomach in particular by pointing out that opioid
receptors are not only located in the brain but also in the gut. Most
importantly, she adds that opiates must first be absorbed into the body
before even having any recognisable drug effect on the central nervous
system. What is more, the products of the body’s digestive processes,
metabolites , are no less potent than the drug itself. In this way, Markley
discusses pharmacokinetics —the movements of drugs in a physiological
system—to investigate the complex interactions that subtend the two
most common pharmacological heuristics of drug action and drug effect.
She then identifies how De Quincey’s gastro-intestinal rhetoric remaps
the interrelation of drug actions and effects as well as their side effects.
Specifically, Markley traces how, in Confessions, the narrator’s stomach
pains are conflated with memories of starvation, emotional pain and drug
withdrawal. In a pharmakonian sense, then, the drug becomes pain and
relief, poison and remedy in ways that extend the pharmacological signifi-
cance of ‘opium-eating’ to include the affective and psychological circuits
in which De Quincey inscribes his habit. Markley concludes that while
De Quincey’s pharmacological explanations of addiction are inaccurate,
they nonetheless hold possibilities for rethinking the social, cultural and
biomedical contexts of our modern concepts of addiction.
One way of considering the relationship between humans and drugs
is to rethink the way we imagine the boundary between the two. In “A
Posthumanist Approach to Agency in De Quincey’s Confessions ”, Anna
 1 SITUATING PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 11

Rowntree takes a vital materialist approach arguing that substances, and

not only humans, have a kind of agency. She points to De Quincey’s
own claim that opium is the ‘true hero’ of Confessions, taking this as
her cue to de-centre the human and put pressure on the belief that
the human is rational and self-governing. Rowntree’s reconsideration of
addiction takes into account the substance’s power to affect the human
body, arguing that the human and the drug act in assemblage with each
other. Rowntree reads Confessions as a document of symptoms interesting
to the medical practitioner, which points to the drug’s power to exceed
human comprehension and perhaps even empirical understanding.

Drug Action and Effect: The Cultural Politics

of Psychopharmacological Knowledge
Our third section explores the way literary texts entice us to think
about the way external forces—cultural and political—inflect the way
contemporaries interpreted drug effects. In “Reading De Quinceyean
Rhetoric Against the Grain: An Actor-Network-Theory Approach”, Anuj
Gupta considers the relationship between De Quincey’s Confessions and
nineteenth-century medical texts on opium by writers such as John
Awister, John Jones and John Brown. He argues that the concept of
‘anthropocentric utilitarianism’ was the dominant discursive trope across
medical and literary genres, a trope that conditioned the ways in which
the nineteenth-century English public understood the drug effects of
psychoactive substances. In other words, what mattered most in these
texts was the question of which advantages or disadvantages drugs—in
this case opium—had for the human body, whether they were useful
and beneficial or whether they caused harm. In a rapidly industrialising
age, these texts became increasingly occupied with the calming effects
of opium, which led to the conceptualisation of the drug as an anti-
dote for a culture in need of relief from the ‘side effects’ of capitalism.
Gupta points out that this utilitarian orientation in De Quincey’s writings
and those of contemporary medical experts was limited by an anthro-
pocentrism that imagined the interaction between humans and drugs as a
one-way linear process involving an agential human being as subject and a
lifeless, passive psychoactive substance as an object. He further argues that
this rigid ‘anthropocentric utilitarianism’ is concomitant with a significant
epistemic limitation of the modern Western world. In this regard, he calls
attention to a so-called plant blindness characteristic to modern society,
12 N. ROXBURGH AND J. S. HENKE

one that emerges in the nineteenth century. Gupta proposes that Actor-
Network-Theory (ANT) offers a possible method to read these texts on
opium against the grain in order to overcome these limitations. Using
this method, he debunks the idea of opium as an inert substance and
contextualises it with a complex history of human-plant co-evolution.
Another way economics informs psychopharmacology is through the
way political economy and the Opium Wars are intertwined. In “Blood
Streams, Cash Flows and Circulations of Desire: Psychopharmacolog-
ical Knowledge About Opium in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Fiction”,
Nadine Böhm-Schnitker focuses on the discourse on opium at the dawn
of the First Opium War. Early nineteenth-century women’s fiction about
the domestic use of opium—whose effects are here understood within
a Brunonian medical framework—cannot be read without considering
global reverberations. Opium circulates in bloodstreams as well as in
economic channels, and the logic of these circulations intersects with the
social construction of gender and class inequalities at home. Nineteenth-
century women writers document these intersections and betray the
sociopolitical workings of opium by showing what kinds of psychological
and physical relief the drug provides. Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801),
for instance, foreshadows the concerns of later sensation fiction writers
and documents the ways in which the psychological impact of opium
betrays the intertwinements of the economic desires of empire, the crav-
ings and addictions of the body, the structures of gendered suppression
and political economy. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1853) connects
the political with the private and reveals opium addiction to be a crucial
relay between individual desire, empire and domesticity. The works of
fiction under consideration here not only focus on the gendering of
different forms of opium consumption but also render it abundantly clear
that opium correlates with economic as well as colonial aspects that conse-
quently interconnect the management of the body with the management
of finances and colonial expansion. These texts provide a double reflection
on psychopharmacology in that they represent the characters’ knowledge
about opium’s effects on mind and body on the diegetic level and reveal
the wider sociocultural contexts in which the drug plays a role.
Besides economics, national discourses also inflect the way contem-
poraries understood drugs. This is particularly telling in the case of
absinthe, a drink made from alcohol and wormwood (whose active ingre-
dient is a drug called thujone). In “The Indeterminate Pharmacology
of Absinthe in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Beyond”, Vanessa
 1 SITUATING PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 13

Herrmann considers the known drug effects of absinthe in the Victo-

rian period alongside today’s scientific knowledge. She draws on results
provided by twenty-first-century medico-scientific studies that are, inter-
estingly, not consistent in their findings about thujone’s drug effects.
Some studies deny any hallucinogenic or lethal attributes of thujone while
others confirm it. In order to highlight the drink’s indeterminate effects,
Herrmann provides a reading of two nineteenth-century literary texts—by
Christina Rossetti and Robert Hichens—representing a common under-
standing of the beverage. Absinthe was the drink of choice for artists such
as Wilde, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Van Gogh. Attitudes and inter-
pretations of the drink’s effects are sometimes ambiguous, and they reflect
national attitudes (in this case, ones about the French) as well as moral
outlooks.

Historicising the Prescription:

Medication and Self-Medication
With the growing professionalisation of medicine came a more struc-
tured and systematic way of recommending and dispensing drugs, and
a tighter definition of how drugs should be used as medications, but this
was a long time coming. Our first two contributions in this section argue
that gender plays a significant role in the way drugs were prescribed. In
“‘She furnishes the fan and the lavender water’: Nervous Distress, Female
Healers and Jane Austen’s Herbal Medicine”, Rebecca Spear draws on
the question of gender to understand the way drugs were prescribed by
laypeople. Although medicinal botany was becoming increasingly asso-
ciated with professional medical practice, the dispensation of simple
medicines for acute nervous distress remained synonymous with the
medical care intrinsic to women’s social interactions and private expe-
riences. Spear states that a reference to lavender water—a common
plant-based remedy for nervous distress in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries—was deleted in the history of Austen’s novella “Kitty,
or the Bower” (1792–1816). In addition to power shifts from medic-
inal to scientific botany that affected women’s medical practices and
proto-feminist communities, Spear examines the effects of fashion and
sexual difference upon the uses of lavender as a substance associated with
strengthening the nerves. Advancing its discussion of nervous disease,
sexual difference and the fashionable remedy, this contribution also
takes Austen’s Steventon novels Northanger Abbey (1818) and Sense
14 N. ROXBURGH AND J. S. HENKE

and Sensibility (1811) into consideration. Austen’s depictions of laven-

der’s use, its soothing and restorative drug effects, function as a means
of subverting hypotheses regarding women’s predisposition to nervous
disease. Discussing the experimental materia medica, Spear suggests that
portrayals of lavender’s potency serve as Austen’s protest against patriar-
chal suppression through professionalisation of the medical practice and
medicalisation of women’s proto-pharmacological knowledge. She asserts
that lavender—a substance regarded as efficacious in folk and rational
medicines—becomes a metonym for the recovery of women healers, their
knowledge and proto-feminist communities in Austen’s writings.
Joseph Crawford’s “‘When poor mama long restless lies, / She drinks
the poppy’s juice’: Opium and Gender in British Romantic Literature”
brings the question of domesticity to bear on prescription and gender.
By the later eighteenth century, it had become clear that opium could
function either as a ‘stimulant’ or as a ‘relaxant’. These different drug
effects, however, did not have equal cultural status, and while the use
of opium as a sedative and painkiller was routine and unremarkable, the
recreational use of the drug for its stimulant and hallucinogenic prop-
erties was the subject of widespread disapproval and was associated with
the deviant figure of the ‘oriental opium-eater’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and Thomas De Quincey both wrote about the vision-inducing powers of
opium, and its importance to their respective works has been repeatedly
investigated by scholars. It has more seldom been noted, however, that
another literature of opium use existed in Romantic-era Britain, which
is to be found in the less well-known works of their female contempo-
raries. Opium literature written by women depicted the drug in a very
different light: not as a seductive and destructive stimulant which enticed
the (male) artist away from his domestic responsibilities, but as a relaxant
that helped its (female) users to cope with the demands imposed by the
very world of mundane domesticity which male opium-eaters were stereo-
typically regarded as using the drug to forsake. Crawford suggests that
this distinction between male and female writing about opium in the
period corresponds to the double role played by the drug in contem-
porary British society as a whole. By aligning their use of opium with
the ‘moderate’ and medicinal consumption of opiates recommended by
contemporary doctors rather than with the deviant figure of the selfish
and hedonistic opium-eater, these female writers were able to imply that
their drug use was compatible with, and indeed contributed to, their
ability to selflessly and effectively discharge their domestic duties.
 1 SITUATING PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 15

Our final essay marks a transition from self-medication and prescrip-

tion to the rise of a more regulated professional medicine and pharmacy.
Björn Bosserhoff’s “Middlemarch and Medical Practice in the Regency
Era: From ‘Bottles of Stuff’ to the Clinical Gaze” argues that during
much of the nineteenth century, rather than being perceived as an
exotic recreational drug, opium was very much part of the daily lives of
Britons—usually taken in the form of laudanum, a wildly popular tincture
prescribed for anything from common coughs and colds to tuberculosis
and ‘insanity’. In his discussion of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Bosser-
hoff focuses on the novel’s doctor-protagonist, Tertius Lydgate, and his
stance towards the use of drugs in medical practice. Middlemarch portrays
a time when, though little was actually known about drug action, most
British practitioners nonetheless resorted to shotgun polypharmacy as
treatment of choice for most diseases. Trained in Paris, Lydgate instead
champions a largely noninterventionist approach, based—as Bosserhoff
shows by contextualising Lydgate’s views within contemporary discourses
on pharmacotherapy—on models such as Vitet’s and Laënnec’s médecine
expectante. Eliot’s fictional doctor thus emerges as one of the foremost
examples of an early clinician in the Foucauldian mode, a pioneering
scientist-physician with a greater understanding of the effects drugs like
opium have on individual bodies.

-------
In 2017, the philosopher Fredric Svenaeus published a study on
phenomenology and bioethics in which he argued that medical tech-
nologies, among them psychopharmacological drugs, have altered our
understanding of what it means to be human. Svenaeus calls for a philo-
sophical analysis of this question and criticises the absence of such studies
in the field of medical ethics. In the same way that Svenaeus’ book
brings phenomenology and bioethics together, our volume interweaves
psychopharmacology and literature in order to tackle questions that often
get left out of public discussion of drugs owing to disciplinary boundaries.
Literary and cultural texts help to do the work that Svenaeus and others
have been calling for: to consider the social, cultural and political contexts
alongside the science of drugs, a context which forces one to address the
nuances of interpreting how one feels under the influence, and how the
drug effect is situated within a nexus of other forces. Such work is tanta-
mount to parsing out the human condition and is therefore a relevant
16 N. ROXBURGH AND J. S. HENKE

supplement for other cultural practices fused with the allure and promises
of technological progress. It is this sort of insight that the present volume
hopes to create by focusing on literature from the last decades of the eigh-
teenth century to the close of the nineteenth, from Erasmus Darwin to
the use of absinthe in the fin de siècle.

References
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Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge. New York:
Octagon Books.
Barbara, Jean-Gaël. 2015. History of Psychopharmacology: From Functional
Restitution to Functional Enhancement. In Handbook of Neuroethics, 1st ed.,
ed. Jens Clausen and Neil Levy, 489–504. Dordrecht: Springer Science +
Business Media.
Boon, Marcus. 2002. The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Budge, Gavin. 2013. Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural:
Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Campbell, Elizabeth A. 2007. Don’t Say It with Nightshade: Sentimental Botany
and the Natural History of ‘Atropa Belladonna’. Victorian Literature and
Culture 35 (2): 607–15.
Clej, Alina. 1995. A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the
Intoxication of Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Comitini, Patricia. 2012. The Strange Case of Addiction in Robert Louis Steven-
son’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Victorian Review 38 (1):
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Courtwright, David T. 2001. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the
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Curth, Louise Hill. 2006. From Physick to Pharmacology: Five Hundred Years of
British Drug Retailing. Aldershot: Ashgate.
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dream and known himself in his real nature. This is the teaching of
Advaita, the non-dualistic Vedânta.
These are the three steps which Vedânta philosophy has taken, and
we cannot go beyond, because we cannot go beyond unity. When
any science reaches a unity it cannot possibly go any farther. You
cannot go beyond this idea of the Absolute, the One Idea of the
universe, out of which everything else has evolved. All people cannot
take up this Advaita philosophy; it is too hard. First of all, it is very
difficult to understand it intellectually. It requires the sharpest of
intellects, a bold understanding. Secondly, it does not suit the vast
majority of people.
It is better to begin with the first of these three steps. Then by
thinking of that and understanding it, the second one will open of
itself. Just as a race travels, so individuals have to travel. The steps
which the human race has taken to come to the highest pinnacle of
religious thought, every individual will have to take. Only, while the
human race took millions of years to reach from one step to another,
individuals may live the whole life of the human race in a few years,
or they may be able to do it more quickly, perhaps in six months. But
each one of us will have to go through these steps. Those of you
who are non-dualists can, no doubt, look back to the period of your
lives when you were strong dualists. As soon as you think you are a
body and a mind, you will have to accept the whole of this dream. If
you have one piece you must take the whole. The man who says,
here is this world but there is no God, is a fool, because if there be a
world there will have to be a cause of the world, and that is what is
called God. You cannot have an effect without knowing that there is
a cause. God will only vanish when this world vanishes. When you
have realized your one-ness with God, this world will no longer be for
you. As long as this dream exists, however, we are bound to see
ourselves as being born and dying, but as soon as the dream that
we are bodies vanishes, so will vanish this dream that we are being
born and dying, and so will vanish the other dream that there is a
universe. That very thing which we now see as this universe will
appear to us as God, and that very God who was so long external,
will appear as the very Self of our own selves. The last word of
Advaita is, Tat tvam asi,—“That thou art.”
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what is best and noblest in man. It makes no foolish mysteries and
demands no blind belief. It puts forth its system in a plain and simple
manner. It is able to present its own method without in any way
attacking the method of others. It manifests a charity that it is usual
to call Christian but which Vivekânanda proves is equally the
property of the Hindu. If this little book had nothing to teach but the
beautiful toleration it advocates, it would be well worth reading; but
many will find in it valuable suggestions to aid in reaching the higher
life.”—Arena, Mar., 1897.
“A large part of the book is occupied with that method of attaining
perfection known as Râja Yoga, and there are also translations of a
number of aphorisms and an excellent glossary.”—Living Age,
August 5th, 1899.
“A valuable portion of the volume to students is the glossary of
Sanskrit technical terms. This includes not only such terms as are
employed in the book, but also those frequently employed in works
on the Vedânta philosophy in general.”—New York Times, July 22d,
1899.
“A new edition with enlarged glossary, which will be welcomed by
students of comparative religion, who are already familiar with the
author’s lectures in this country.”—Review of Reviews, Oct., 1899.
“The methods of practical realization of the divine within the human
are applicable to all religions, and all peoples, and only vary in their
details to suit the idiosyncrasy of race and individuals.”—Post,
Washington, D. C., June 12th, 1899.

Sent on receipt of price and postage by the

VEDÂNTA PUBLICATION COMMITTEE

135 West 80th St., New York.

Agents for Europe—Messrs. LUZAC & CO.,

London, W. C., 46 Great Russell St.
The Sayings of Sri Râmakrishna.
COMPILED BY

SWÂMI ABHEDÂNANDA
234 pages. Flexible cloth, gilt top, 75c. net. Postage, 4c.
Râmakrishna was a great Hindu saint of the nineteenth century who
has already had an influence on the religious thought of America and
England through the teachings of his disciples, Swâmi Vivekânanda,
Swâmi Abhedânanda, and others. His Sayings are full of broad
practical, non-sectarian instructions concerning the spiritual life
which cannot but give help and inspiration to the followers of all
creeds. The present volume contains a larger number of Sayings
than has yet appeared in any one English collection. For the first
time also they have been classified into chapters and arranged in
logical sequence under marginal headings, such as “All creeds paths
to God,” “Power of Mind and Thought,” “Meditation,” “Perseverance.”
As an exposition of the universal truths of Religion and their
application to the daily life this book takes its place among the great
scriptures of the world.

My Master
By SWÂMI VIVEKÂNANDA
12mo, 90 pages. Cloth, 50 cents. Postage, 6 cents.
“This little book gives an account of the character and career of the
remarkable man known in India as Paramahamsa Srimat
Râmakrishna, who is regarded by a great number of his countrymen
as a divine incarnation. It is not more remarkable for the story it tells
of a holy man than for the clear English in which it is told, and the
expressions of elevated thought in its pages.”—Journal, Indianapolis,
May 13th, 1901.
“The book, besides telling the life of Sri Râmakrishna, gives an
insight into some of the religious ideas of the Hindus and sets forth
the more important ideals that vitally influence India’s teeming
millions. If we are willing to sympathetically study the religious views
of our Aryan brethren of the Orient, we shall find them governed by
spiritual concepts in no way inferior to the highest known to
ourselves, concepts which were thought out and practically applied
by these ancient philosophers in ages so remote as to antedate
history.”—Post, Washington, May 13th, 1901.
Sent on receipt of price and postage by the

VEDÂNTA PUBLICATION COMMITTEE

135 West 80th Street, New York.

Agts. for Europe—Messrs. LUZAC & CO., London, W. C.,

46 Great Russell Street.

By SWÂMI ABHEDÂNANDA

Divine Heritage of Man

12mo, 215 pages. Portrait of author, frontispiece.
Cloth, $1.00. Postage, 8 cents.
Contents. I. Existence of God. II. Attributes of God. III. Has God
any Form? IV. Fatherhood and Motherhood of God. V. Relation of
Soul to God. VI. What is an Incarnation of God? VII. Son of God.
VIII. Divine Principle in Man.
“The Swâmi Abhedânanda’s writings are also
companionable and readable.... The Philosophy of India,
being the bringing together of the best thoughts and
reasonings of the best men for the thousands of preceding
years, had under consideration the self-same problems
that are to-day vexing the souls of our philosophers. The
Swâmi’s book is therefore not so radical a departure from
accepted thought as might at first be imagined.... It is not
meat for babes, but rather will it give new lines of thought
to the brightest intellects.”—Transcript, Boston, Aug.,
1903.
“His method of dealing with these fundamental questions
is peculiarly free both from dogmatic assertion and from
pure metaphysical speculation.”—Inter-Ocean, Chicago,
Aug., 1903.
“He bases his arguments, not on theological hypotheses,
but on scientific facts.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug.,
1903.
“It is written in a plain and logical style, and cannot fail to
interest all who are anxious for information concerning the
philosophy of which the author is such an able
exponent.”—Times, Pittsburg, June, 1903.
“A glance over a few of its pages would be sufficient to
convince the reader that he is in the presence of an
intellect of high order, more thoroughly conversant with the
philosophies and sciences of the Occidental world than
most Europeans or Americans.... The ‘Divine Heritage of
Man’ gives a rare insight into the religious views of
educated Hindoos and its argumentation furnishes an
intellectual treat.”—Chronicle, San Francisco, Aug., 1903.
“Fully cognizant of modern scientific discoveries, the
author treats his subject broadly.”—Bookseller,
 Newsdealer, and Publisher, New York, Aug., 1903.
“The student of religions will find much of value in the
discourses, since they are full of historical information
concerning the origin and growth of certain ideas and
beliefs dominant in Christianity.”—Republican, Denver,
July, 1903.
“There is no disposition on the part of the author to assail
any of the Christian principles, but he simply presents his
subject with calmness, not attempting to reconcile religion
and science, for to him they are one.”—Washington Post,
June, 1903.

How to be a Yogi.
I.Introductory.
II.What is Yoga?
III.Science of Breathing.
IV.Was Christ a Yogi?
12mo, 188 pages. Cloth, $1.00. Postage, 8 cents.
“For Christians interested in foreign missions this book is of moment,
as showing the method of reasoning which they must be prepared to
meet if they are to influence the educated Hindu. To the Orientalist,
and the philosopher also, the book is not without interest.... Swâmi
Abhedânanda preaches no mushroom creed and no Eurasian hybrid
‘theosophy.’ He aims to give us a compendious account of Yoga.
Clearly and admirably he performs his task. In form the little bank is
excellent, and its English style is good.”—New York Times Saturday
Review of Books, Dec. 6, 1902.
“‘How to be a Yogi’ is a little volume that makes very interesting
reading. The book contains the directions that must be followed in
physical as well as in mental training by one who wishes to have full
and perfect control of all his powers.”—Record-Herald, Chicago,
Feb. 28, 1903.
“The Swâmi writes in a clear, direct manner. His chapter on Breath
will elicit more than ordinary attention, as there is much in it that will
prove helpful. The book makes a valuable addition to Vedânta
Philosophy.”—Mind, June, 1903.
“The book is calculated to interest the student of Oriental thought
and familiarize the unread with one of the greatest philosophical
systems of the world.”—Buffalo Courier, Nov. 23, 1902.
“‘How to be a Yogi’ practically sums up the whole science of Vedânta
Philosophy. The term Yogi is lucidly defined and a full analysis is
given of the science of breathing and its bearing on the highest
spiritual development. The methods and practices of Yoga are
interestingly set forth, and not the least important teaching of the
book is the assertion of how great a Yogi was Jesus of Nazareth.”—
The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer, Jan. 15, 1903.
“This book is well worth a careful reading. Condensed, yet clear and
concise, it fills one with the desire to emulate these Yogis in attaining
spiritual perfection.”—Unity, Kansas City, Dec., 1902.

Religion of Vedânta
Pamphlet printed for free distribution. 12mo, 8 pages. $1.00 for 150.

NEW BOOK BY SWÂMI ABHEDÂNANDA

Self-Knowledge (Atma-Jnâna.)
 Cloth, $1.00. Postage, 8 cents. Portrait of author, frontispiece.
Contents.
I.Spirit and Matter.
II.Knowledge of the Self.
III.Prâna and the Self.
IV.Search after the Self.
V.Realization of the Self.
VI.Immortality and the Self.
“So practically and exhaustively is each phase of the subject treated
that it may well serve as a text-book for any one striving for self-
development and a deeper understanding of human nature.”—
Toronto Saturday Night, Dec., 1905.
“It will also be welcomed by students of the Vedic Scriptures, since
each chapter is based upon some one of the ancient Vedas known
as the Upanishads, and many passages are quoted.”—Chicago
Inter-Ocean, Jan., 1906.
“The book, from the gifted pen of the head of the Vedânta Society of
New York, presents in a clear manner, calculated to arrest the
attention of those not yet familiar with Vedic literature, the principles
of self-knowledge as taught by the leaders of that philosophy.... The
many passages quoted prove the profound wisdom and practical
teaching contained in the early Hindu Scriptures.”—Washington
Evening Star, Dec., 1905.
“A new book which will be welcome to students of Truth, whether it
be found in the Eastern religions, in modern thought or
elsewhere.”—Unity, Nov., 1905.
“The book is very well written.”—San Francisco Chronicle, Dec.,
1905.
“In forcefulness and clearness of style it is in every way equal to the
other works by the Swâmi Abhedânanda, who has always shown
himself in his writings a remarkable master of the English
language.”—Mexican Herald, Dec., 1905.
“The volume is forcefully written, as are all of this author’s works,
and cannot fail to be of great interest to all who have entered this
field of thought. A fine portrait of the Swâmi forms the
frontispiece.”—Toledo Blade, Nov., 1905.

Spiritual Unfoldment.
I.Self-control.
II.Concentration and Meditation.
III.God-consciousness.
Paper, 35 cents. Cloth, 50 cents. Postage, 2 and 6 cents.
“This attractive little volume comprises three lectures on the Vedânta
Philosophy. The discourses will be found vitally helpful even by those
who know little and care less about the spiritual and ethical
teachings of which the Swâmi is an able and popular exponent. As
the Vedânta itself is largely a doctrine of universals and ultimates, so
also is this book of common utility and significance among all races
of believers. Its precepts are susceptible of application by any
rational thinker, regardless of religious predilection and inherited
prejudices. The principles set forth by this teacher are an excellent
corrective of spiritual bias or narrowness, and as such the present
work is to be commended. It has already awakened an interest in
Oriental literature that augurs well for the cause of human
brotherhood, and it merits a wide circulation among all who cherish
advanced ideals.”—Mind, April, 1902.

Reincarnation.
New and Enlarged Edition.
 Paper, 40 cents. Cloth, 60 cents. Postage, 3 and 7 cents.
Contents.
I.What is Reincarnation?
II.Heredity and Reincarnation.
III.Evolution and Reincarnation.
IV.Which is Scientific, Resurrection or Reincarnation?
V.Theory of Transmigration.

Orders received and filled promptly by the

VEDÂNTA PUBLICATION COMMITTEE,

135 W. 80th St., New York.

Agents for Europe—Messrs. LUZAC & CO.,

London, W. C., 46 Great Russell Street.

India and Her People

(Lectures delivered before the Brooklyn Institute
of Arts and Sciences during the season
of 1905-1906)

BY

SWÂMI ABHEDÂNANDA
Cloth, $1.25. Postage, 10 Cents.
Contents.
 I.Philosophy of India To-day.
II.Religions of India.
III.Social Status of India: Their System of Caste.
IV.Political Institutions of India.
V.Education in India.
The Influence of India on Western Civilization and the Influence
VI.
of Western Civilization on India.
“This book has more than usual interest as coming from one who
knows the Occident and both knows and loves the Orient.... It is
decidedly interesting.... The book has two admirable qualities:
breadth in scope and suggestiveness in material.”—Bulletin of the
American Geographical Society, Sept., 1906.
“This volume, written in an attractive style and dealing with the life,
philosophy and religion of India, should prove a useful addition to the
literature of a fascinating and as yet largely unknown subject. It is
designed for popular reading, the metaphysical portions being so
handled that the reader runs little risk of getting beyond his depth.”—
Literary Digest, Feb. 16, 1907.
“The Swâmi possesses the exceptional advantage of being able to
look upon his own country almost from the standpoint of an outsider
and to handle his subject free from both foreign and native
prejudice.”—New York World, Aug. 4, 1906.
“It is a valuable contribution to Western knowledge of India,
containing precisely what the American wants to know about that
region.”—Washington Evening Star, Aug. 4, 1906.
 Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed
without notice. Accent marks have been
standardized.
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain
The following printer errors have been changed.
CHANGED FROM TO
“the raison d'etre “the raison d'être
Page 12:
of that” of that”
“quieting down “quieting down
Page 26:
aplies” applies”
“state, “state,
Page 30:
disintegradation” disintegration”
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JNÂNA YOGA,
PART II: SEVEN LECTURES ***

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