Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)
New Books in Literary Studies
The Subjective Accounts of Drug Experiences
In the days before tick box diagnosis being able to describe a medical Condition was you know very important skill, uh and a lot of um doctors were extraordinarily good at it. These descriptions by scientists bleed out into the wider culture They're often written in literary terms trying to describe an altered state of consciousness is a literary form as much as a scientific form Quite often they're published in popular magazines of the day. Particularly towards the end of the 19th century when what we now call People drugs start to be conceived as more of a social problem. It becomes very important for scientists to make it clear that their scientific research is not of the same caliber as somebody randomly buying hashish or cocaine in a Pharm
