Ego behind cocaine use
QUESTION Did Sigmund Freud dose his patients with cocaine? ON April 21, 1884, a 28-year- old Sigmund Freud wrote to his fiancée Martha Bernays, telling her: ‘I have been reading about cocaine, the effective ingredient of coca leaves, which some Indian tribes chew to make themselves resistant to privation and fatigue.’ Freud was soon telling Bernays about the many experiments in which he had selfadministered the drug, finding it useful in relieving brief episodes of depression and anxiety.
He published a paper, called Über Cocaine, i n July 1884, and i ts language was, for Freud, surprisingly unscientific. He described how ‘a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I’m just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.’
He used expressions such as ‘the most gorgeous excitement’ that animals display after an injection of cocaine, and administering an ‘offering’ of it rather than a ‘dose’.
He strongly rebuffed the ‘slander’ that had been published about the drug. Freud became a strong proponent of cocaine as a stimulant and analgesic, and he wrote several articles recommending medical applications, including its use as an anti- depressant. He administered cocaine to his patients and was a proponent of replacement therapy, using cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction.
He introduced cocaine to his friend Ernst von Fleischl- Marxow, a brilliant physiologist who had become addicted to morphine taken to relieve years of nerve pain.
Freud transformed his highly functioning, albeit opiatedependent, friend into an addled cocaine and morphine addict who died seven years later.
Despite this, for the next 12 years Freud continued to consume a great deal of cocaine to quell his physical aches and mental anxieties.
In 1895, he and his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss nearly killed Emma Eckstein t hrough a botched operation and too much cocaine while attempting to cure her ‘nasal reflex neurosis’.
Freud gave up cocaine in 1896, but his reputation was tarnished after promoting the drug. Peter Reese, Aberystwyth.
QUESTION How did St Columba become the patron saint of computer hackers? COLUMBA (521-597) is historically revered as a warrior to whom many prophecies, visions, miracles and legends are attributed, including being the first person on record to have seen the Loch Ness monster. He’s a patron saint of Ireland and Scotland a nd of poets a nd bookbinders. Columba was raised as a poet ( filidh) and used his political influence to persuade King Aedh to preserve the bardic traditions of Ireland. He loved books and went to pains to obtain or make copies of psalters, bibles and manuscripts for his monks. Not long after being ordained a priest, he called on Finnian, abbot of Clonard Abbey, who had returned from Rome with a copy of St Jerome’s translation of the Psalms.
Columba knew he must have it and went about making an exact copy. He had just finished when Finnian got wind of this.
As the copy was unauthorised, Finnian demanded it be handed over. The case was brought before King Diarmaid, overlord of Ireland. The king decided: ‘To every cow her calf and to every book its son-book. Therefore, the copy you made, O Colum Cille, belongs to Finnian.’
This and other grievances resulted in a war between Columba’s clan and the clans loyal to Diarmaid.
At the battle of Cuil Dremne, Columba was victorious, although he was accused of being morally r esponsible f or driving 3, 000 unprepared souls into eternity. He was sent into exile and ordered as a penance to convert as many souls as had perished in the battle. This story has earned him the patronage of bookbinders and plagiarists, and the modern extension of plagiarism is computer piracy and hacking. Callum McCrae, Troon, Ayrshire.
QUESTION Is it true that Ringsend in Dublin was once known as Raytown because of the popularity of the flatfish as a food source with locals? RINGSEND has long been known as Raytown because of the predilection of local people for eating ray.
This part of Dublin, on the southern side of the mouth of the River Liffey, was once a narrow peninsula cut off from the rest of Dublin by the estuary of the River Dodder.
It was at Ringsend that Oliver Cromwell first made landfall in Ireland when he landed there on August 15, 1649.
Later, Ringsend became the place where cross-channel ferries docked.
After the decline as a ferry terminal, Ringsend still maintained a tradition of being a fishing village.
Shrimps had long been caught on the strand at Irishtown, up until the great frost of 1740, which killed off the shrimp trade. People in Ringsend also developed a great liking for the various species of ray.
Out of the eight kinds of ray, the two most popular have always been the cuckoo ray and the blond ray, followed by the thornray. The Irish Sea ray fishery is one of the longest established of its kind in the northeast Atlantic. Between 1920 and 1940, the British fishing fleet landed between 5,000 and 6, 000 tons of ray a year from the Irish Sea, but as that fishing fleet declined, Irish whitefish trawlers took over, landing about 2,000 tons a year of ray up to 1990.
Such was the liking of Ringsend people for ray that in the heyday of the fishmongers in Moore Street, Dublin, their best customers were the people who lived in Ringsend.
Long before the Italian fish and chip shops began in Dublin in the earlier 20th Century, the liking of Ringsend people for ray with chips was well known. When t hi s enjoyment of ray extended into the new fangled fish and chip shops, the expression of having a ‘one and one’ was derived from servings of ray and chips. In Ringsend itself, what was called ‘ towed ray’ came to be known as a local delicacy.
So hardly surprisingly, given that ray has been popular for so long in Ringsend, that the suburb acquired the name of Raytown.
In Ringsend, many of the families have been there f or countless generations. So many people called Byrne or Murphy live in the area that nicknames are commonplace.
Ringsend once had one of the biggest Protestant working class communities in Ireland; many lived i n the so- called Four Shilling Cottages on Pigeon House Road.
But for everyone in Ringsend, whether from a long settled family, or a recently arrived resident, the nickname ‘Raytown’ is still instantly identifiable as another name for Ringsend. Sarah O’Toole, Dublin 7.
QUESTION What is the significance of Phlebas The Phoenician in T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land? CONTRARY to the earlier answer, the name Phlebas, which Eliot invented, isn’t necessarily from the Greek and ‘vein’. To many scholars, including William Arrowsmith, it contains a deliberate direction to Plato’s dialogue, The Philebus.
The association is confirmed by the reference, typical of Eliot, of the last line — ‘Remember Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you’ — to a sentence in the Philebus: ‘And he’ll imagine still more often that he is taller and more handsome than he is.’
In the dialogue, Socrates argues against Philebus that we must distinguish between the soul and the body, and that the proper business of the human being is not pleasure or profit, but the life of the mind and the pursuit of virtue.
That makes a more subtle Eliotlike reminder in Phlebas to those of an unexamined life.
The choice of a Phoenician is significant, even i f Eliot overintellectualised. Phoenician is a Semitic language, like Hebrew, and taking off the customary Greek ending -as gives the Semitic threeconsonant root ph-l-b.
So Philebus, minus its ending, would to a Phoenician appear related.
Eliot was nearing the end of his agnostic stage and by the end of the decade was an Anglo-Catholic, with his sometimes difficult religious poetry to come.
Socrates calls Philebus’s most severe critics ‘the unpleasant people’ ( duskhereis) and this is echoed in Eliot’s Five-Finger Exercises: How unpleasant to meet Mr Eliot, With his features of clerical cut . . . And his conversation, so nicely Restricted to What Precisely, And If and Perhaps and But . . .
Tom McIntyre, Frome, Somerset.