I believe it was the philosopher Rick James who said “cocaine’s a hell of a drug.”
Today’s Moment of Science… Cocaine spinal injections.
Leaves of the coca plant contain several pharmacologically spirited compounds, the most festive being its curious namesake stimulant, cocaine. Grown as a crop for thousands of years, the alkaloid is typically found at a concentration just shy of 1%. Traditionally, it’s made into tea or the leaves are chewed. Along with reducing fatigue, it also suppresses appetite, manages altitude sickness, and makes you really want to talk about your screenplay at 4am.
But if that was all cocaine did, I wouldn’t be writing about it. Again.
In the late 1850s, a German PhD student named Albert Niemann was handed a satchel of coca leaves imported from South America and told “analyze this but idk not with your mouth.” So Niemann extracted the cocaine alkaloid and elucidated its chemical structure. He even improved the purification process for the molecule. But he just had to lick the science.
Niemann discovered that if you put a touch of cocaine on your tongue, like a spark of Medellin magic it caused a “peculiar numbness.” He also died two years later from complications of synthesizing mustard gas so maybe use your PPE.
It’s possible that this property in the coca leaves had been observed before, but that ‘peculiar numbness’ Neimann observed would herald huge changes for the field of anesthesia. In the 1880s, further experiments were done that showed cocaine’s unique capacity to provide local numbing, precipitating its use in eye surgery.
General anesthesia had been performed regularly since the 1840s, but it still wasn’t exactly the propofol dream that it is now. In 1898, German surgeon August Bier had a patient who needed a complicated ankle surgery. But they’d had a miserable experience with general anesthesia. Bier suggested something that probably sounded much angrier in the original German and translated to “cocainization of the spinal column.”
He injected 15mg of cocaine directly into this man’s spinal column. The patient remained conscious but felt no pain. They did have quite the headache after it wore off, but that cleared up eventually. After testing this out on five more patients, like a true anesthesiologist, Bier decided to try it out on himself.
His assistant, Dr. August Hildebrandt, agreed to inject his spinal column with cocaine. Due to an apparent mishap with the syringe and needle not fitting, Bier instead received one fucker of a spinal tap and no goddamn cocaine. At which point it was decided that he would instead inject Dr. Hildebrandt.
Hildebrandt said he couldn’t move or feel his legs. Bier got up to some wacky “can you feel this now” hijinks.
“A large needle was pushed into the femur without causing the slightest pain.”
“Excessive bending of the toes is not unpleasant.”
”Strong blow to the shin with an iron hammer is not felt as pain.”
“There is strong pressure and pulling on the testicles, not painful.”
They reportedly both went out to dinner, drank wine, and smoked several cigars afterwards. They also had nasty headaches from the spinal tap that would take several days to clear up.
From this night of smashed shins and yanked testicles, spinal anesthesia became enshrined in modern medicine. Bier’s idea to “cocainize” the spinal column was a revolution, even if it’s typically performed with something a smidge less fun today.
August Bier lived and worked in Germany for the rest of his life. In 1925 he performed an appendectomy on German president Friedrich Ebert. When Ebert passed away four days later from septic shock, he was succeeded by Paul von Hindenburg.
Bier lived to the age of 87, passing away in 1949.
This has been your Moment of Science, pretty sure I was born at least twenty years late for the really good drugs.
The sensory testing sounds like my last date.
How depressing…