Book Review

Murder, Magic, and Medicine

N Engl J Med 1994; 330:226January 20, 1994

Article

Murder, Magic, and Medicine
By John Mann. 232 pp., illustrated. New York, Oxford University Press, 1993. $29.95. ISBN: 0-19-855561-X

Murder, Magic, and Medicine explores the links between the folk use of plant products and their modern applications in medicine; to a much lesser extent, it addresses products of nonvegetable origin. One chapter is devoted to each of the three uses mentioned in the title, with coverage stretching from the dawn of civilization to the present. In each chapter, Mann, an organic chemist, describes historical experiences with the drug, hallucinogen, or poison, and he discusses the mode of toxic, psychoactive, or therapeutic action.

This book perhaps tries to be too many things in a single work: a history of drugs, an elementary textbook of pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, a cultural study of the use of illicit drugs, and a primer on toxicology. Considering how much ground is mapped out, the bibliography is surprisingly slim, with some glaring omissions of secondary literature. For example, none of the highly relevant works of John Riddle, Jerry Stannard, or John Scarborough on ancient and medieval drug use appear, and although Walter Sneader's Drug Discovery: The Evolution of Modern Medicines (New York: John Wiley, 1986) is appropriately listed, Niles Weatherall's In Search of a Cure: A History of Pharmaceutical Discovery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) is not to be found. The absence of the latter is all the more surprising, since that book and Mann's are published by the same firm.

Mann makes use of excellent quotations to illustrate his story, especially in the chapter on magic, which contains some fascinating first-person accounts of experiences with psychoactive drugs. His allusion to the experimentation with tubocurarine at some pharmaceutical firms around the 1930s whets the appetite for more of this story, especially since the companies that he mentions happened to be in countries with restrictions on experimentation in animals. The wish to know more applies as well to his discussion of I.G. Farben and its work on neurotoxic gases during World War II. However, it is probably not advisable to ask for more from a book that offers too much already.

A few items in this book require correction or clarification. Mann suggests that the U.S. government engaged in a long fight with the Coca-Cola Company in the early 20th century over the beverage's cocaine content. In fact, the fight concerned Coca-Cola's added caffeine. The claim that smoking marijuana “is in fact legal in many states, e.g., California,” insofar as it refers to recreational use, is also incorrect. Distillation was not an invention of the Arabs in the 10th century; that procedure had been in use for many centuries by that time. The author's discussion of cortisone mentions only the work of Philip Hench (not “Hensch”); Hench's chemist colleague, Edward Calvin Kendall, shared the Nobel prize in 1950 (with Tadeus Reichstein) for their work on cortisone. One is less forgiving of sloppy references to a number of others, such as Gregory, not “George,” Pincus; David Hosack, not “Hosach”; Paul Ehrlich, whom most regard as the father of chemotherapy, not “Erlich,” the “father of medicinal chemistry”; and John Jacob Abel, not simply “Jacob Abel,” whom most would consider more a pharmacologist than a physician. And “FDA” does not stand for the Federal Drug Administration.

This book would have made a better contribution to the literature if it had traced through each chapter on murder, magic, and medicine a number of products that were used for all three purposes -- to poison, mystify, and treat. The author does this to a limited extent with a few products, such as curare, mandrake, henbane, deadly nightshade, jimsonweed, ergot, and cantharides. Unfortunately, much of what we read is well covered in the literature, especially the material in the chapter on medicine. The author's idea was a very good one: to trace the long history of agents that have had this tripartite function. It would have worked more effectively had he stuck to that, abandoned most of his discussion of modern pharmacology, and focused his discussion of medicine on those drugs that had a parallel history as poisons and potions.

John P. Swann, Ph.D.
Food and Drug Administration, Rockville, MD 20857