The Opium Experiments
One of the most fascinating things about Dr. Ricketson’s professional life has to be his experiences with Opium. The common view of opium was that you required a unique latex derived from a plant grown only in a relatively small region in Europe to get the effects of this plant. Numerous attempts were made by botanists to find a substitute for it, but unfortunately, any other plants with this miraculous latex were ineffective at producing the same satisfaction.
In spite of this finding, we repeatedly find people experimenting with other plants that bore latex, with hope of getting that sense of enlightenment that only true opium provides. The most famous such plant in American history is the wild lettuce plant, Lactuca sativa, which was actually the domestic Lactuca probably imported from Europe some time during the 17th century and since taken to the wild by the end of the 18th century. Other so-called opium substitutes over the years have included other plants in the Opium family, and even some unexpected inebriants like Skunk Cabbage. Likewise, the United States spent a lot of time focused on other ways of improving upon one innermost spirits, strangely paying limited attention to what we today might expect to be anticipated as being gratifying, like the conversion of Cannabis from a hemp product or the possible discovery of another version of soma of the Middle East.
Few plants of hallucinogenic or illusionogenic importance were discovered during the colonial years by arrive European settlers. Whilst the Native Americans down south and residing on tropical islands found their own satisfaction with liquors made from agave, coconut milk, and numerous orchids (salap), European immigrants were making little progress with the more important staples of life such as cultivated farm goods and wine and rum producing sugar and starch producers. Even those plants most often associated with recreational use today were more associated with bad omens, poor health, and even Satan himself at times. The ergot of grains, the addition of the wrong mushroom to one’s food stuffs, the inclusion of some unusual seed from a grain field weed to the bread flour, all of these had impacts that would leave even the most open-minded amateur botanist to believe that the red love apple (tomato) was truly a poison or the new mandrake of this half of the globe (podophyllum peltatum) was fatal to certain livestock and domesticated animals.
Numerous events related to the North American poisonous plants like the numerous cacti, james town weed, locoweed, and tobacco, had mixed effects upon the European cultures trying to duplicate the Native American uses of these plants. Meanwhile, in the midst of the gathering of this new ethnobotany information, Shadrach Ricketson was seeing Opium in his own way as a Quaker and a physician. Ricketson’s view of opium was that it was a plant that could possibly be cultivated in the United States, given the right growing conditions and set up for raising such a foreign species. Exactly how and why Ricketson decided to ask and answer this question himself came about as an experience he had with the Turkish opium during the 1780s, in which he kept a journal detailing his experiences as a user. This article is barely ever cited, and was published in a fairly unknown common reader’s magazine for the time. Yet this description by Ricketson of his journey with Opium tells us he was not only exploring the use of the drug plants as a substance influencing the body, but also a means for reaching deep within your chest, heart or brain, with the hopes of finding the personal soul. A Quaker might indeed think this way, if (s)he understands and believes in God as spirit, and God as the source of life, the cause for Universal Electricity, or as Quakers in Ricketson’s group called Him, the “Universal Light.”
Ricketson’s experiences with opium when he was in his twenties led to the publication of the following article about opium by him. This in turn led to the publication of numerous reviews of his experience with the plant most linked to the Quaker like experience of gratification due to internal personal enlightenment.
The first item, in German, tells us about this event and discovery of Ricketson in 1799. Yet we hear very little about this part of his life for years to come. By 1806, Ricketson’s “discovery” and recommendations about planting Papaver somniferum locally, finally received the support it has earned. Like his book, this delayed recognition is in contrast to later Quaker discoveries of equal moral value, although influencing greatly different socially important issues, such as slavery or the rights of prisoners. Yet, as a Quaker, Ricketson was very much an open-minded physician practicing religion. His respect for religion in general is demonstrated by the relationship he developed with one of the more innovative religious communities for its time–the Shaker Village up in New Lebanon. According to early medical botany historian Jacob Green, Ricketson and the Shakers made Papaver somniferum a staple crop of New York.
The following is the first article Shadrach Ricketson wrote on Opium. This article is scarcely mentioned in any writings on Shadrach Ricketson, and the general impression of Ricketson’s writing about Papaver is that his articles or pamphlets focused on technique for growing this plant. But once one gets several paragraphs into this article, one can see it is very different from all of the later items published about his work. This article consists of recounts of his first hand experiences experimenting with the use of opium, amazing for both the period of time in American medical history it represents and the new knowledge. . . and wisdom . . . Dr. Ricketson developed due to his experiments.
Shadrach performed these tests to prove that poppies grown in North America could be just as useful medicinally as the imported and often more expensive Turkish opium latex.
In the section of this writing at the end he entitled Quaeritur, which roughly translates into ‘Final/End Query’, he poses some very interesting questions about opium and the healing powers of nature.
This had a very important impact not only on medicine in gernal, but a very personal and symbolic impact upon a specific group of healers whose work at the community service level made a significant difference upon many New York lives. The Shaker community just north of Dutchess County in New Lebanon, and at times very close to Quaker doctor Shadrach Ricketson who made a temporary stay near Troy, NY, would ultimately co-op with Ricketson and become a major provider of this valuable medicine for years and decades to come. Acknowledgement of this relationship is found in the 1812 to 1825 writings included as well on this page.
.This review begins with the following most important article from The American Museum or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, &C., Prose and Poetical, v6, 1789 (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey).
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Google Books Source for the above
Foreign Influences
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Article by a colleague of Ricketson . . .
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Ricketson’s important announcement locally of his discovery
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(Notice the lack of any mention of his experimentation with opium in this and any of the other later articles)
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Local Recommendations . . .
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Note: in the following page, first line, ‘profunda irriti le fibre’ or ‘profound irritation effect upon the fiber (of muscle)’ suggests the nervous energy theory, a brunonian-cullen-thacher sequel. See each for more on this theory of the body’s ways of working in the Colonial Era review of philosophies.
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Brian Altonen, MPH, MS 