Excerpt from The Practitioner, Vol. 34: A Journal of Therapeutics and Public Health; January to June
Cocaine or Cucaine, the local an?sthetic, which has during the last few months obtained so great a notoriety, is obtained from the leaves of a South American plant called Erythroxylon Coca. The properties of the leaves of this plant have given rise to descriptions as celestial as those of De Quincey on opium. Mantegazza says "God is unjust for having made man live without coca; I would prefer a life of ten years with coca to one of ten thousand centuries without."
The first account of its uses is from the writings of Tsehudi in 1838; he says that the natives of Chili and Peru commence the use of it when quite young, and continue it till old age, preferring hunger to loss of coca. An Indian servant, sixty-two years old, worked day and night for five days, with the exception of two hours sleep daily, at a difficult task, with no food except that procured by the chewing of coca. This statement is corroborated by the experience of all the earlier writers on this subject.
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