Opium: Reality's Dark Dream by Thomas Dormandy: review The author of this lively and fascinating chronicle of opium remembers his first encounter with it when as a child he was given an anaesthetic before an operation: "It transported the present writer into a land of indescribable bliss, never experienced before or since." The drug has often prompted responses on this grand scale. In around 1625 Prince Gabriel of Transylvania thought "it lifts the spirit like prayer"; 600 years earlier Avicenna called it "one of Allah's most signal gifts"; in 1700 John Jones in his Mysteries of Opium Revealed credited it not just with dulling pain but inducing "Serenity, Promptitude, Alacrity... Euphory, Contentation and Equanimity." Baudelaire, alive to the heights and the depths, found in it "a dear and old woman friend full of caresses and, alas, of deception." Despite his de Quincey-ish memory of indescribable bliss, Thomas Dormandy has written an unrhapsodic, sceptical, vividly documented history of the drug. He has an eye for quotation (including the ones above) and a man of the world tone, dry, witty, not easily impressed. A history of trade, empire and war as well as disease and health, the book takes us all the way from Stone Age man cultivating poppies to the Afghanistan of the Taliban and Hamid Karzai. Focused on Britain, it goes also from classical Greece and Rome to the Turkey and China and America of the past 300 years. The book is a remarkable synthesis of different fields of knowledge. It is especially strong on medical history, as one might expect given that Dormandy is a retired pathologist, and perhaps least convincing on literature. The account of the Romantic poets, for instance, is broad-brush and old fashioned, with a sometimes shaky grasp of detail. Coleridge's age at his death, to take an example from a key player, is out by more than a decade; later we hear that Keats's " "Eve of St Agnes" is full of opium-inspired erotic images," which is empty-handed unless we are told which images and why the drugs should get the credit. The book's centre of attention is the 19th century. Until then opium, always labour-intensive in its production, had been a commodity for the rich, but it now became relatively cheap and widespread, mainly because of the brutally exploitative role of British imperial commerce in its industrial manufacture. Dormandy gives an often shocking account of the extent of opium use in Victorian Britain. Imports rose sixfold between 1825 and 1850, from 23,300 kilos to 138,000. By 1870 the income from its export accounted for no less than a fifth of the Exchequer's revenue, mainly and shamefully at the expense of the immiserated and addicted Chinese. A coin laid on the counter of a bar usually meant you wanted a stick of opium or a refreshing glass of laudanum. "It keeps womenfolk quiet, it do," says an old fenlander in Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850). It seems often to have been mother's little helper in childcare, and one effect of the 1868 Poisons and Pharmacy Act was to reduce infant mortality by opium overdose by two thirds. The roll-call of famous 19th-century morphinists and morphinomaniacs, as they were called for a while, ranges far and wide. Florence Nightingale we knew about, but how about Otto von Bismarck, who regularly injected to brace himself for parliamentary speeches? We knew about the novelist Wilkie Collins, but there is also his thoroughly respectable colleague Mrs Humphry Ward, who wrote that "my syringe and my needle, like my toothbrush and prayer book, are sacrosanct. I would not dream of allowing even my best friend to share them. Very wise, as 20th-century understandings of transmittable disease would show; but the syringe and needle still had respectability in the late 19th century, and Dormandy shows how crucial the new technologies for the intravenous injection of opiates had proved, both medically better and for addicts worse. Later chapters of the book document the pharmaceutical discovery of heroin, so named because its first German samplers found it made them feel heroisch, and follow the drug through depressing chronicles of its rise and of the ineffective and often hypocritical legislative crackdowns against its use. Dormandy also gives a moving account of the importance of opiates in palliative care, a topic on which the author writes with humane conviction throughout the book. Peter Swaab's edition of Sara Coleridge's prose, The Regions of Sara Coleridge's Thought, is published by Palgrave Macmillan Opium: Reality's Dark Dream by Thomas Dormandy 352pp, Yale University Press t £25 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £25, ebook £25.75)