CALKINS, Alonzo.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Opium and the Opium-Appetite: First edition. This copy includes an apparently unrecorded original photograph of Calkins (1804-1878) by the distinguished German-born photographer William Kurtz (1834-1904), perhaps best known for his portraits of Walt Whitman and his pioneering work with the half-tone process. His fine portrait of Calkins shows the doctor seated in an armchair with a reading lectern, holding open a book at an illustration of a poppy."Enlivened with quotations from world literature and based on laconically but vividly recounted case histories, it is an all-round survey of the rising American drug habit" (Dormandy). "Comparing opium and morphine with alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, tobacco and other substances of addiction Calkins was in no doubt that opium and its derivatives represented by far the greatest threats to his country's future … [it] is a classic in a field in which trash predominates".

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