In May 1884 the Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal published a physician’s first-person account of a drug experience that reads like a modern trip report from 140 years ago. Suffering “general neurasthenia,” New York doctor Frank Dudley Beane (1851–94) wanted to avoid opium and morphia — so he self-administered tinctures of cannabis and ergot, mailed to him by the pharmaceutical firm Parke, Davis & Co. Ross MacFarlane’s Public Domain Review essay places the account in a lineage running from Humphry Davy’s nitrous oxide experiments (1799) to Albert Hofmann’s first LSD ride (1943) to today’s Erowid.

The trip, as Beane recorded it:

  • 10:15 AM: 0.46 ml cannabis and 1.39 ml ergot tinctures → momentary dizziness, “peculiar lightness,” an indescribable dread, muscular weakness
  • Half a glass of port, a difficult climb of two floors, then a “horrible feeling of impending death”; brandy, and a colleague who prescribed atropine for a pulse gone “quick and feeble”
  • “Motor and sensory paralysis,” then three sensations at once: speeding through utter darkness in an interminable tunnel, an out-of-body view of his own corpse from above, and full awareness of his wife and doctor’s conversation
  • The darkness gives way to phosphorescent light — “the most beautiful and soft lilac shade of misty brightness” — and the exclamation: “Oh! What a beautiful purplish hue!”
  • His body seemed “fashioned from wood”; he woke at 4:30 PM in “the most hilarious exhilation,” certain only fifteen minutes had passed — his wife reported he “cried most piteously”

Two details give the piece its sting:

  • Ergot is the rye fungus later used to synthesize lysergic acid — making Beane’s experience as much a proto-LSD trip as a cannabis high
  • Beane closes by endorsing “Parke Davis & Co’s preparation of haschisch,” and scholars suspect he was in the company’s pay — Parke, Davis later paid a young Sigmund Freud $24 (roughly $800 today) to praise their cocaine, making this drug literature and early pharmaceutical trade literature at once

A vertiginous document of 19th-century self-experimentation that doubles as a case study in the birth of pharma marketing.