On 17th century "cocaine"

A new analysis of mummified brains pushes back the timeline for the globalization of coca

Earlier this year, amid a sea of bones in the vaulted crypt beneath Milan’s Ca’ Granda hospital, Italian researchers made an intriguing discovery. Analyzing mummified brain tissue from two men who died at the hospital in the seventeenth century, they found evidence of coca use—the earliest ever detected outside of South America. Their results, published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science, push back our documentation of coca’s presence in the Old World by nearly two centuries. It’s one of my favorite historical finds of the year, and I was happy to speak about it to a New York Times reporter who covered the story here.

First things first, though: many of the headlines about this discovery (including the NYT’s “Europeans Used Cocaine Much Earlier Than Previously Thought, Study Finds”) are wrong. Cocaine was being used in the 17th century by literally no one. It did not exist yet.

Coca did.

As you can see, the Times was not the only news outlet to be confused about the distinction between cocaine and coca:

Coca leaves, chewed or brewed as tea, have been used for thousands of years in South America as a mild stimulant and appetite suppressant. Cocaine hydrochloride, on the other hand, is a powerful alkaloid first isolated from coca leaves in 1855 by a German chemist.

Why does it matter? The distinction is crucial, not just for understanding this particular discovery, but for understanding the history of drugs as a whole. The shift from coca to cocaine was part of the industrialization of drugs in the 19th century. As David Courtwright writes in his book Forces of Habit, “factories did for drugs what canning did to vegetables. They democratized them. It became easier, cheaper, and faster for the masses to saturate their brains with chemicals.”

And not only was it cheaper — the chemicals in question were also way more potent. The first generation to widely experience addiction to cocaine (and other new industrialized drugs like heroin) came of age in the 1880s and 1890s. They were the vanguard of the modern era of drugs that we are still living in, and they were experiencing something genuinely new. Not just the substances themselves, but the feelings they evoked had never before been experienced by all the billions of humans who preceded them.

The difference between coca and cocaine, or opium and heroin, is not just a matter of degree. They are fundamentally different things.

Clive Owen’s cocaine-addicted surgeon in Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick, set circa 1900 — IMO, one of the best fictional depictions of historical drug use.

This industrialization of drugs marks a watershed moment in human history. The new wave of hyper-available, hyper-potent synthetic and semi-synthetic drugs influenced modernity in hundreds of complex but important ways, from the mass-produced amphetamines that accompanied World War II-era armies into battle to the opioid epidemic and the rise of “narco-states” to the contemporary prevalence of antidepressants and ADHD prescriptions.

“Como un hombre borracho”

Back to the mummified brains in 17th century Milan. What was actually found in them, as the journal article makes clear, were chemical markers that point decisively to the use of the plant form of the drug (leaves of the Erythroxylaceae family of plants, i.e. coca) and not cocaine salts. So what were coca leaves doing in 17th century Milan?

Milan was actually part of the Spanish empire throughout the 17th century, as you can (just barely) see on this incredibly complicated and detailed map of Spanish/Hapsburg imperial claims over time:

Map of the Spanish Empire via Wikimedia Commons.

Milan, in other words, was not just a major, cosmopolitan city of the 17th century, but also a hub of a global Spanish empire. It’s plausible to imagine an aging conquistador, or an ambitious physician, or a merchant, or perhaps just an interested traveler, reaching the city from South America and carrying a small chest of coca leaves with them. Whether those leaves were sold to hospital patients directly — and whether they were used medically or recreationally — is impossible to say, although it is definitely interesting that the study notes that both of the two documented coca users from 17th century Milan seem to have used the drug shortly before their death.

Although I was surprised by the methodology of the study — I had no idea that toxicological analysis of the sort done in drug tests worked so well on centuries-old brains — I don’t actually find it very surprising that coca reached Europe at this time. When Spanish conquistadors and missionaries first encountered coca use among indigenous Andean peoples in the 16th century, they were fairly quick to recognize its significance both as a tool for exploiting indigenous labor and as a potential trade good. By 1580, when the Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes wrote the following, I can easily imagine someone like Monardes carrying a sample back with him to a city like Seville, Lisbon, or Milan as a curiosity:

The use of it among the Indians [los Indios] is very common for many purposes: when they walk out of necessity, and for their pleasure when they are at home, they use it... When they want to get drunk, or feel somewhat out of their senses, they mix the coca with tobacco leaves, and they suck it all together, walking around as if they were out of their minds like a drunken man [como un hombre borracho], which is something that gives them great satisfaction to be in that state.

What’s most interesting about the presence of coca in the brains of ordinary Milanese hospital patients is that it suggests something more than just elite experimentation — something that is a step toward the “democratized” modern drug culture that David Courtwright wrote about. It hints at a more widespread knowledge and use of the plant than we previously suspected.

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This, in turn, raises fascinating questions about early modern trade networks, medical practices, and cultural exchange.

Were these individuals outliers, or representative of a broader pattern of coca use in 17th century Europe — one which historians had never before noticed because, hitherto, we weren’t drug testing mummified brains found in hospital crypts?

Women harvesting coca in Bolivia, c. 1867 (Wellcome Collection, public domain).

We can’t answer this question until, well… we look at a lot more mummified brains from a lot more early modern archaeological sites. That sort of thing is not my forte, but I would be thrilled to be part of that hunt in my capacity as an archive-bound historian rather than a laboratory scientist.

As I said in the NYT article, it is really exciting and fascinating to see all the ways that the physical records of the past are now intersecting with the written records. I wrote about this last year in the context of the Herculaneum scrolls and the use of AI and advanced imaging to decipher classical texts which were once thought to be lost. But a similar process is now underway when it comes to the chemical and genetic analysis of historical drug samples, both in human and animal tissue and in archaeological remains like ceramic jars. It’s a truly exciting time to be working in the history of medicine. (I just wish adequate funding existed to push things further).

Was recreational or medicinal coca use something that was happening all over Europe in the 1600s? Or was there something unique about these two people and how they came into contact with the plant?

Answering those questions will take a lot more searching — both in the archives and in the laboratory.

Weekly links

• Speaking of cocaine history, I enjoyed this article on cocaine’s first era of mass popularity in the 1890s (Aeon).

• Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri was one of the first people to travel the world entirely for fun rather than for profit. He offers helpful tips about how to finance such travels, such as buying “dates, wine, spirits, and all the fruits of Persia, which one carries to India either dried or pickled in vinegar, on which one makes a good profit.” See also his Manila—> Mexico trick for cornering the market in mercury used to treat syphilis (Wikipedia)

• “Bronze Age cheese reveals human-Lactobacillus interactions over evolutionary history” (journal article in Cell, open-access)

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