An essay on hasheesh: Including observations and experiments

An essay on hasheesh by Victor Robinson is a medico-historical essay with case studies written in the early 20th century. The book investigates the intoxicating hemp plant as a narcotic: its botany, chemistry, pharmacology, medical uses, and cultural history, alongside first-person experiments that illustrate its subjective effects.

The book opens with a sweeping tour of materia medica, then narrows to cannabis: its global habitat, cultivation and resin collection, diœcious botany, seed and fiber uses, and government controls. It recounts ancient and medieval references (from Greek and Sanskrit sources to the Assassins), the modern medical revival via O’Shaughnessy, and the uncertain chemistry behind its active principles. Robinson outlines physiological actions, therapeutic indications, official preparations, and sample prescriptions, stressing its variability and noted absence of a lethal dose. The core narrative is a set of vivid experiments: a brother’s delayed onset of hilarity and verbal play; a court stenographer’s grandiose “comet” reverie and monomania about “the great idea”; a critic’s unstoppable, protean laughter with time distortion; and the narrator’s own night of celestial music, weightless flight, erotic visions, brief nausea, and a luminous afterglow. An appendix records a subject’s double-consciousness and altered sense of time; the work closes with a sonnet, blending scholarship, anecdote, and lyricism into a concise portrait of hasheesh’s powers and limits.