“That Vast Quantity of Laudanum I Have Been Known to Take”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20106757 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Benjamin Breen (0000-0003-0518-0226, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 60 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 82-100 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Language Notes (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8282 • E-ISSN: 2573-3575 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00138282-9560232 |
| OpenAlex | W4225006085 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 32 |
An impostor who claimed to be a refugee from Formosa (present-day Taiwan) named George Psalmanazar (1679?–1763) embodied two key aspects of addiction in eighteenth-century Europe: its connections to globalization and imperialism, and the complex interplay between the concept of “positive” addictions (such as addiction to study, devotion, or duty) and the growing attention paid to “negative” ones (addiction to superstition, sexuality, or intoxicating substances). Constantly changing his identity in response to his audience’s expectations, Psalmanazar lived a life of continual performance—performance that hinged on trading one set of addictions for another. As he abandoned his falsified persona as an opiate-addicted, sexually licentious Taiwanese aristocrat, Psalmanazar embraced a postimposture persona as a pious scholar of religion who, like the holy men he studied, was “addicted to the reading . . . [of] sacred writings.” Strikingly, however, this second life as a humble scholar was sustained by regular opiate use. What had changed was how Psalmanazar thought about his use of the drug: no longer in the service of “vanity” or “extravagance” but instead in the service of God. With their blend of introspection and self-deception, Psalmanazar’s Memoirs (1764) index the changing social and cultural roles of opiates and the concept of addiction in eighteenth-century Europe and beyond
Addiction · Afterlife · Art · Human sexuality · Literature · Memoir · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Psychology
The Industrious Revolution
The Blue Frontier
Dark Paradise
Performing China
The Social Life of Coffee
The Persian Mirror
The etymology and early history of ‘addiction’
"The Tender Frame of Man"
The Psalmanazar Affair and the Birth of Taiwan Studies in Europe
Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe
The Making of Addiction
Exotic Drugs and English Medicine
Plant economy and territory exploitation in the Alps during the Neolithic (5000–4200 cal bc)
Protestant evangelicals and addiction in early modern English
No Man Is an Island
The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium
Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World
The opium poppy in Europe
Plant economy at a late Neolithic lake dwelling site in Slovenia at the time of the Alpine Iceman
Where Was the Coffee in Early Modern England
Ch'ing Changing Images of the Overseas Chinese (1644-1912)
Intoxicants and the invention of 'consumption
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |