The Doctor Who Put Hemp in Other Hands
From Bedside to Journal
When William Brooke O'Shaughnessy searched European medical literature for hemp in the late 1830s, he came back with almost nothing. The standard French works on materia medica were silent about its medicinal effects. Apart from a few young men in Marseilles who had tried Egyptian hashish as a frolic, and Hahnemann's use of a hemp wine, he could trace no European employment of the drug. Across India, Persia, Egypt and much of Africa, popular medicine reached for hemp in spasm and neuralgic pain. What Western European medicine lacked was a sustained clinical account that joined preparation, dose, observed effect and named cases.
O'Shaughnessy had arrived in Calcutta in 1833, a twenty-four-year-old assistant surgeon in the East India Company's service. By the end of the decade he was professor of chemistry at the new Medical College, and he later served as the government's chemical examiner, analysing the remains sent to him in suspected poisonings. He brought the same habits to medicine that he brought to forensic work. In August 1838 he laid before the Medical Society of Calcutta thirty-two cases of fever treated with narcotine, an opium alkaloid, as a substitute for quinine. The report named the colleagues who had supplied each case and counted the recoveries.
A report like that served a practical purpose. It named the disease and the drug, gave the amount and how often it was repeated, and recorded what followed and who had seen it. A physician in Edinburgh or London could read it and judge whether the patients had really been ill and whether the recoveries might have come anyway. Readers still had to accept that the cases happened as described, but the detail gave them something concrete to examine. Doctors who had never met O'Shaughnessy and owed him nothing could study his observations and try them for themselves.
Hemp was about to receive the same treatment, with one difference that would take years to surface. O'Shaughnessy assembled his hemp record in Calcutta, and most of what went into it came from the city or passed through it. The drug came from local bazaars or down from Nepal. The patients lay in Calcutta's hospitals, and some of them had smoked gunjah for years. His informants included Persian and Sanskrit scholars, a police officer and a man who made hemp sweets for a living. How the record would fare in hospitals with different supplies, among patients who had never touched the drug, was something no care taken in Calcutta could settle.
Before the Patients
He opened his paper with history to show, as he put it, the exact state of knowledge when he began. Most of that knowledge reached him through other people, and he named them. Syed Keramut Ali of the Hooghly Imambarah and the Persian physician Mirza Abdul Razes described hemp consumption from Kandahar to Herat. The Pandit Madhusudan Gupta supplied notices from Sanskrit materia medica. A Mr. DaCosta provided notes from the Persian Makhzan-ul-Adwiya. McCann, deputy superintendent of police, explained where Bengal's gunjah was grown and how it was sold. Dr. Campbell, late political resident in Nepal, sent specimens of churrus.
The most unusual informant was Ameer, proprietor of a well-known Calcutta resort for hemp users, who made majoon, the hemp confection, in front of O'Shaughnessy and described its effects. O'Shaughnessy recorded the recipe step by step. Then he did something the rest of his inquiry would repeat. He accepted Ameer's account of the immediate effects as accurate and rejected Ameer's claim that long use caused no madness or other harm. Informants supplied claims, and he sorted them.
That sorting shaped his first practical decision. The Arab pharmacologist Ibn Baitar gave a dose of a direm, about forty-eight grains of churrus. O'Shaughnessy thought it enormous and resolved to begin far lower. What followed, he wrote, would show how fortunate that caution had been.
His knowledge of hemp came from sources at different distances from direct observation. Some of it he witnessed himself, as when Ameer made majoon before him. More came from informants describing how hemp was grown, sold and used from Bengal to Herat, accounts he could weigh but not observe. The oldest material was furthest removed, reaching him as Sanskrit and Persian texts summarised by translators and assistants. Together these sources give a sound picture of hemp around Calcutta in the late 1830s. They offer no direct view of ancient practice, and the further a claim sits from what he watched, the more it depends on someone else's reading.
Tested Before Trusted
Before any patient received hemp, animals did. In the first recorded experiment, ten grains of Nepalese churrus dissolved in spirit were given to a middling-sized dog. Within half an hour it was dozing and starting up, eating greedily and staggering when called, with what O'Shaughnessy called a look of utter and helpless drunkenness. The symptoms faded after about two hours, and by six hours the dog was well. A very small dog given twenty grains lost the use of its hind legs for a time and recovered within four hours.
Across these and other trials he saw no sign of pain and no convulsive movement. The comparison that struck him most was between kinds of animal. Dogs, cats, pigs, fish, vultures and crows were reliably intoxicated. Horses, deer, monkeys, goats, sheep and cattle showed only trivial effects at any dose he gave.
He drew a large conclusion. Encouraged by these results, he wrote, no hesitation could be felt as to the perfect safety of an extensive trial in patients. His cautious choice of a starting dose contrasted with the confidence of that conclusion. The experiments supported something narrower. They showed the material was active and the animals recovered, and they revealed how sharply sensitivity differed between species. None of it could show how a sick person would respond to a given amount, and his first patients made that plain.
What the Ward Saw
On 6 November 1838, one grain of hemp resin in solution was given to each of three rheumatism patients in the Medical College's clinical hospital. The effects were far stronger than O'Shaughnessy had expected. That evening the clinical clerk on duty sent an urgent note, and he found one patient insensible but breathing regularly. While waiting for an emetic he lifted the man's arm and found that it stayed where he had placed it. The limbs held any attitude, even against gravity. A second patient broke into uncontrollable laughter and soon stiffened the same way. The third man, a habitual gunjah smoker, felt nothing. Both affected patients recovered from the immediate effects overnight and, in O'Shaughnessy's phrase, were "discharged quite cured in three days after." Later rheumatism patients received half a grain.
The hydrophobia case that began on 22 November ended differently. The patient, the Hakim Abdullah, was himself a physician, bitten by a rabid dog three weeks earlier and already unable to drink. Hourly doses of resin left him calm enough to discuss his own case, and for a time he could swallow orange juice. The paroxysms returned whenever he woke, and he died on 27 November. O'Shaughnessy claimed no cure and doubted one would ever come from hemp. He did argue that "the awful malady was stripped of its horrors," and he admitted he had had no data to guide the dose.
During a cholera epidemic, students reported cures daily, but O'Shaughnessy conceded that the epidemic was mild and the cases inconclusive.
Tetanus drew his strongest language. Ramjan Khan's tetanus had not yielded to opium and calomel, but under repeated doses of resin his spasms stopped. He died weeks later of spreading mortification, and O'Shaughnessy still counted it a success against tetanus, since the death came from a different disease. Mr. O'Brien of the Native Hospital reported four recoveries in seven cases, and Dr. Bain of the Police Hospital two in three. Attributing two fatal cases after childbirth to overheated confinement rooms, O'Shaughnessy called hemp's powers against tetanus "satisfactorily and incontrovertibly established."
The infant case shows O'Shaughnessy recording one of his most revealing failures. A girl forty days old, convulsing despite purgatives, leeches and opiates, slept for days after three drops of tincture. When the fits returned, further drops did nothing, until it emerged that the spirit had evaporated from a badly stoppered bottle and the child had in effect been given plain water. A fresh preparation in rising doses stopped the fits, and by mid-December she was in robust health.
These pages hold advocacy and admission side by side. O'Shaughnessy defended his interpretations firmly, and he also wrote down his alarm at the first cataleptic patient, the physician he could not save, and the bottle that had quietly failed. His conclusions sometimes ran ahead of his cases. The cases were written precisely enough for a reader to see where.
Calcutta to London
The paper was read before the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta in October 1839 and printed that year in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and as a forty-six-page pamphlet. In July 1840 the British and Foreign Medical Review gave the pamphlet a long notice, predicting a great sensation throughout the profession and quoting the author's own words for accuracy's sake. In 1842 hemp also appeared in the Bengal Dispensatory, O'Shaughnessy's survey of Indian materia medica.
He then carried both the drug and the paper to England himself. On leave in London by early 1843, he revised the paper for the Provincial Medical Journal and added material the Calcutta version lacked. Churrus he had sent to the London pharmacologist Jonathan Pereira had produced little effect, which he put down to age and adulteration. He had also given Peter Squire, a pharmacist in Oxford Street, a large supply of gunjah, and Squire had promised extract to any hospital physician or surgeon who wanted it. O'Shaughnessy stated his aim plainly. He wanted the remedy "extensively and exactly tested without favor or prejudice."
That sentence marks the record changing hands. In Calcutta he had chosen the patients, watched the doses and interpreted what followed. In London the extract went out over a pharmacy counter to physicians he would never meet, working with patients and supplies he could not inspect.
In Other Hands
Disagreement arrived within weeks of the revised paper. On 8 February 1843 O'Shaughnessy wrote to the Provincial Medical Journal to disclaim any wish to present hemp as a specific for tetanus. Mr. Ley, working with the drug in England, had found that far larger doses were needed there than in India, and his results differed from O'Shaughnessy's own on minor points as well. O'Shaughnessy welcomed the difference as proof that Ley was "recording faithfully what he sees, and is not merely treading in the footsteps of another."
By the time the Pharmaceutical Society took up the drug, in a discussion reported in 1847, the disagreement had widened. Speakers offered competing explanations for the British failures, from overheating during preparation and decayed plants to material made from hemp grown near London. Mr. Redwood reported that O'Shaughnessy himself, on his last visit, had admitted that even extract he brought from India had failed in British hospitals. Two members then described extract from the same supplier giving opposite results. Mr. Bartlett had seen a very small dose of Squire's extract act as a powerful narcotic on one of his assistants, while Dr. Ure had taken extract from Squire for some time without the slightest effect. The chairman judged the state of knowledge very unsatisfactory and imperfect.
The meeting did not settle whether O'Shaughnessy had been right. His own pages had left that decision to others. In 1839 he had described his aim as gathering a few strong facts, finding "the limits which cannot be passed without danger," and then leaving the profession "to prosecute and decide on the subject." Eight years later the profession was doing so in public, testing claims that carried his name against results from wards and dispensaries he had never seen.
Hemp was already a medicine when he found it, in the bazaars and texts he credited on his opening pages. What he added was a record that could leave his bedside. It travelled to London and reached physicians he never met. When their results did not match his, those disagreements entered the published medical record alongside his original claims. He had written it so that people free to disagree with him could test what he reported and publish what they found.
References & Citations
O’Shaughnessy, Bishop’s College Press, 1839 — original Calcutta monograph on Indian hemp.
Informs: Provides the primary basis for the article’s treatment of O’Shaughnessy’s informants, animal experiments, clinical cases, dosing decisions, and his interpretation of the results.
O’Shaughnessy, Provincial Medical Journal and Retrospect of the Medical Sciences, 1843 — revised British publication of the Calcutta work.
Informs: Clarifies how the Calcutta work entered British medical circulation, including the additions concerning Pereira, Squire, Ley, dose differences in England, and O’Shaughnessy’s call for wider testing.
Anonymous review, British and Foreign Medical Review, 1840 — early British review of O’Shaughnessy’s Calcutta pamphlet.
Informs: Documents the early British reception of the Calcutta pamphlet and helps establish how O’Shaughnessy’s case material circulated before the 1843 revised publication.
O’Shaughnessy, The Bengal Dispensatory, 1842 — survey of Indian materia medica incorporating O’Shaughnessy’s pharmacological work.
Informs: Places hemp within O’Shaughnessy’s broader published survey of Indian materia medica during the period between the Calcutta paper and its British republication.
Robertson, The Medical Examiner, 1847 — “On Extract of Indian Hemp,” reporting later British discussion and conflicting responses.
Informs: Supplies the later British discussion of inconsistent results, competing explanations for those failures, Redwood’s report of O’Shaughnessy’s admission, and the contrasting experiences reported by Bartlett and Ure.