AN ESSAY ON HASHEESH

INCLUDING

OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS

BY VICTOR ROBINSON

Contributing Editor, Medical Review of Reviews, Pharmaceutical Chemist, Columbia University, Member of the American Chemical Society, Author of “Pathfinders in Medicine.”

MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS TWO HUNDRED AND SIX BROADWAY NEW YORK 1912

Copyright, 1912 By MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS

“What is left for us modern men? We cannot be Greek now. The cypress of knowledge springs, and withers when it comes in sight of Troy; the cypress of pleasure likewise, if it has not died already at the root of cankering Calvinism; the cypress of religion is tottering. What is left? Science, for those who are scientific. Art for artists; and all literary men are artists in a way. But science falls not to the lot of all. Art is hardly worth pursuing now. What is left? Hasheesh, I think: Hasheesh of one form or another. We can dull the pangs of the present by living the past again in reveries or learned studies, by illusions of the fancy and a life of self-indulgent dreaming. Take down the perfumed scrolls; open, unroll, peruse, digest, intoxicate your spirit with the flavor. Behold, here is the Athens of Plato in your narcotic visions; Buddha and his anchorites appear; the raptures of St. Francis and the fire-oblations of St. Dominic; the phantasms of mythologies; the birth-throes of religion, the neurotism of chivalry, the passion of past poems; all pass before you in your Maya world of hasheesh, which is criticism.”—John Addington Symonds.