15 October 4pm: “Drinking Cultures” Research Seminar with Dr Douglas Small (online – register for tickets with Eventbrite) 

“Coca Wine to White Powder: Cocaine Addiction and Enhancement at the Fin-de-Siècle”

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, cocaine and its source – the coca plant – existed in a peculiar and sometimes contradictory relationship. Cocaine was simultaneously understood to be both a transformative medical technology (the first effective local anaesthetic) and a terrible source of addiction. At the same time, the coca leaf was beloved of celebrity sportsmen and widely marketed to Victorian consumers as a stimulant and strength-giver. From the 1870s onward, products as diverse as coca wine, coca tea, and even coca chocolate were touted to the public as an “ideal source of endurance”. This paper explores how Victorian culture attempted to distinguish the natural, “gentle support” of the coca leaf from the technological modernity of cocaine, wrestling with the drug’s ambiguous potential for both addiction and enhancement.

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/drinking-cultures-research-seminar-with-dr-douglas-small-tickets-1028778152147