In the modern world, there are some well established ways to get toxicity data on drugs. Back in the day, one brave and/or utterly bonkers doctor decided the only way to establish that data would be to induce a near-death experience.
Well. Very nearly near-death.
Today’s Moment of Science… Cocaine Doctor.
Self-experimentation in medicine comes from the proud tradition of volunteering your own ass for potential pain, death, and occasional medical breakthroughs but almost never without risking the first two. A handful of doctors wrote their tickets into history books with experiments unfit for trying out on anyone else’s body but their own. We know that ulcers are caused by bacteria because Dr. Barry Marshall swallowed a test tube of the stuff, knowing that if his hypothesis was correct, he was gonna get an ulcer (he also got a Nobel Prize). In the late 1700s, English physician William Stark embarked on dozens of restrictive diets to find the exact source of scurvy. He both didn’t figure out the cause and died with symptoms of scurvy, so it’s like he failed twice. Dr. Nicholas Senn showed that gastrointestinal perforation could be diagnosed by plumbing the gastric pipes with six liters of hydrogen gas. He demonstrated this on himself with hydrogen gas pumped in rectally. Which… cool.
Dr. Edwin Katskee was an asshole doctor. I don’t mean to imply anything about his temperament, we don’t know much about him other than that the guy did cocaine “for science,” so. I mean that he was a proctologist and he got paid to expertly examine poopers. Born in 1902, not much was reported about the Nebraska doctor other than his final act, and even that’s shrouded in some mystery.
Modern general anesthesia started becoming a thing in the mid-1800s. Cocaine was discovered to be a powerful local anesthetic. However, much like every other drug we have to manage pain, cocaine is also allegedly fun. It was good at what it did, but it had problems with either not working or making a patient a smidge dead, which called for further investigation into a safe and effective dosage.
Dr. Edwin Katskee decided the best way to sort this was to take simply massive amounts of cocaine. When used as local anesthesia, it’s usually applied topically. Katskee, however, injected the stuff.
Other than writing down whatever he observed on the walls at varying dosages, it’s not entirely clear what his plan was. Find the first dosage where he felt a bit too sweaty and anxious, declaring “that’s the bad dose”? Whatever the plan was, he at least brought an antidote in case of an overdose.
It didn’t appear that he made it past one fatal dose. He failed to take the antidote in his drug induced stupor. By his own account, he had a frantic fifteen minutes or so of scrawling notes on the wall. Some of my favorites include:
“For a better understanding of the bad reactions we see in rectal patients cocaine as applied topically.” Somehow I hadn’t put it together until this moment that they had cocaine frosted buttholes.
“Advise all inquisitive MDs to lay off this stuff.” The 1930s were a different time. A dumber time.
“I guess all the loquaciousness due to the drug.” Cocaine, really?
“Paralysis.” This is suspected to be the last thing he wrote.
Despite one of the notes on the wall reading “cocaine poisoning–not suicide,” investigators ruled his death a suicide. One of his wall screeds said this was his “little way of contributing to the medical and surgical archives of clinical research.” Even if he wasn’t killing himself on purpose, leaving all sorts of “just in case I die here are some notes about my death which I definitely caused but not on purpose wink” notes came off as a tad suspicious. He also left instructions for aiding someone with cocaine poisoning, which seems a quaint way to describe an overdose.
As other topical anesthetics became more widely available, cocaine became less legal through the first half of the twentieth century. It’s unclear what exactly we gained from Dr. Katskee’s experiment other than scientific evidence that cocaine is the reason that friend won’t shut the fuck up about their screenplay.
This has been your Moment of Science, just reminding you that cannabis has never killed anybody.
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