4. Freud prescribed cocaine to cure a close friend’s morphine addiction
Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow was a Viennese physician and friend of Freud’s, who accidentally cut his thumb with a scalpel when dissecting a cadaver. The wound failed to heal, became infected, and led to the amputation of his thumb. When that wound also failed to heal properly, the doctor was forced to endure continuous and agonizing pain in the area where his thumb had once been. The doctor began controlling the pain using morphine, and gradually fell into an expensive and debilitating addiction to the drug. Freud told his friend of his belief that cocaine could control and ultimately end his addiction to morphine, as it had no addictive properties itself.
Dr. von Fleischl-Marxow agreed to try the cure recommended by his friend in May, 1884. Two months later Freud published his findings from his experimentation with cocaine in a paper titled Uber Coca (About Cocaine). It was his first scientific publication of note, and in it, he failed to note the anesthetic qualities of the drug, other than in a postscript. Dr. von Fleischl-Marxow failed to cure his morphine addiction, added to it an expensive cocaine habit, and died at the age of 45. Another friend of Freud’s, Karl Koller, an ophthalmologist, discovered cocaine’s usefulness as an anesthetic for eye surgery, and published his findings to great acclaim in Europe.