Description
Acclaimed medical historian Howard Markel traces the careers of two brilliant young doctors—Sigmund Freud, neurologist, and William Halsted, surgeon—showing how their powerful addictions to cocaine shaped their enormous contributions to psychology and medicine.
When Freud and Halsted started their experiments with cocaine in the 1880s, neither they, nor their colleagues, had any idea of the drug’s potential to dominate and endanger their lives. An Anatomy of Addiction tells the tragic and heroic story of every man, unintentionally struck down in his prime by an insidious malady: tragic on account of the time, relationships, and health cocaine forced every to squander; heroic in the intense battle every man waged to conquer his affliction. Markel writes of the physical and emotional damage caused by the then-heralded wonder drug, and how every man in the long run changed the world regardless of it—or on account of it. One became the father of psychoanalysis; the other, of up to date surgery. Here is the full story, long lost sight of, told in its wealthy historical context.