Broadly, Jay presents the 19th century as “the age of the individual”, in which almost everyone had a jolly time trying out new substances, and the 20th century as “the progressive era”, when things got serious. One reason for the shift in tone was that Collier’s, the company publishing Conan Doyle’s stories in the United States, was in the midst of an anti-drugs crusade. Then, in 1904, he said primly that Watson had “weaned” the great man from his “drug mania”. In the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle presented his detective’s cocaine habit as the exotic eccentricity of a bohemian. Jay smartly signals one of the sea changes with reference to Sherlock Holmes. The reputation of drugs and their ability to shock has ebbed and flowed. Similarly, after Sigmund Freud’s self-experimentation with cocaine in Austria in the 1880s, one of his colleagues adopted the drug as a numbing agent in eye surgery. Wells introduced nitrous oxide into his work and thereby helped inaugurate a new era in anaesthetics. Then in Connecticut in 1844, a dentist named Horace Wells, who happened to be in one of these audiences, saw a participant injure himself but experience no pain.

Volunteers would breathe the gas, then caper about, while onlookers tittered. After Davy’s experiments, for instance, nitrous oxide first became a staple of vaudeville turns.

The medical applications of drugs have sometimes become clear only after their use in less formal settings. Some become questing, drug-ingesting “psychonauts” as a result – and it is they who form the focus of this fascinating book. The twice-born have a life-changing insight or vision. The once-born accept the world as it is and get on with it.

Another laughing gas lover, the psychologist William James, later observed that there are two types of people: the once-born and the twice-born. Bishop Berkeley had made it the cornerstone of his philosophy. While high, Davy declared that “Nothing exists but thoughts!” I must have been doing it wrong because, according to Mike Jay’s compelling history of narcotic self-exploration, it was when the chemist Humphry Davy began inhaling this newly discovered gas in Bristol in 1799, sometimes in the company of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that he started a revolution. It gave me no more of a buzz than smoking a cigarette. B efore writing this review, I got hold of some tiny canisters of nitrous oxide, filled a balloon or two and, watched by my bemused wife, breathed in the gas.

The butchering art book review