On 18 December 1689, Robert Hooke — curator of experiments at the Royal Society, Newton's rival, the man who gave biology the word cell — stood before the Fellows to describe a drug. He had been handed a sample six weeks earlier by an old friend, the sea-captain Robert Knox, over coffee in a London coffeehouse. Knox had spent nearly twenty years a captive in Ceylon and credited the plant with keeping him well on foul water during his escape. Hooke gave the Society the plant's names as the traders knew them: “'Tis call'd, by the Moors, Gange; by the Chingalese, Comsa, and by the Portugals, Bangue.”
Hooke's report, printed posthumously in his Philosophical Experiments and Observations (1726), is precise and a little astonished. The dose is “about as much as may fill a common Tobacco-Pipe”; the patient grows “unable to speak a Word of Sense, yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings”. And his verdict: it might “prove as considerable a Medicine in Drugs, as any that is brought from the Indies”. He even tried to grow the seeds in London.
This is usually told as a charming first — the earliest detailed English-language scientific account of cannabis. But the historian Benjamin Breen, in The Age of Intoxication (2019), reads the same scene more sharply. Hooke knew nothing of this plant's effects until an imperial sailor handed it to him; the knowledge traveled along the arteries of the East India Company and was then quietly relabeled as European discovery. Breen's argument is that early-modern science was built on colonial knowledge networks while erasing the non-European people who supplied them — and that every decision about intoxicants is, at root, a judgment about cultural difference. A drug is medicine or vice depending on who is holding it.
The Source Library collection An Account of the Plant is, in effect, the receipts. Sixty books across twelve languages, from 200 BCE to 1925, let you watch that judgment get made, unmade, and made again.
I. The Plant Had Two Lives
Read the European herbals and you would never guess cannabis could do anything to the mind. From Dioscorides through the hand-coloured woodcuts of the 1484 Herbarius latinus, Leonhart Fuchs's De historia stirpium (1542), and Mattioli's Italian Discorsi (1568), hemp is a sober fibre-and-seed crop: “hot and dry,” good for rope, the seed good for the ears. Europe grew the plant for two millennia and wrote, essentially, nothing about its high. The word itself — Greek kánnabis, Latin cannabis, German Hanf, Dutch hennep, Russian konoplja, all the way back to Assyrian qunnabu — is one ancient root that traveled with the crop across Eurasia.
The other life of the plant lived in the East, under entirely different names, and those texts are in the collection too. The oldest is the most startling. The Chinese Shennong Bencao Jing (by ~200 BCE) already warns that eating cannabis flowers “makes people see ghosts and run wildly,” and that long-term use “connects with the divine light.” China knew the high at the very dawn of its pharmacopeia — then set it aside, domesticating cannabis as a fibre staple. India did the opposite, sacralizing it as vijayā, “the victorious”; the Ayurvedic Sushruta Saṃhitā files it among the fast-acting drugs, “for example, cannabis and opium.” The Islamic world made the resin a mass intoxicant and gave us, by way of the hashish-eaters, our word assassin — a story Edward Lane lays out in his Modern Egyptians.
Even this written record sits on top of something older. In 2019, archaeologists found high-THC cannabis residue in mortuary braziers at the Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamirs, dated to about 500 BCE — ritual cannabis smoking that predates every text we hold. Herodotus saw a version of it among the Scythians: in our Histories they throw hemp-seed on hot stones and howl with pleasure in the vapour-bath.
II. The Bridge Word, and the Forgetting
The two lives met at a single word: bangue. It is the Portuguese transliteration (from Persian bang, Sanskrit bhaṅgā) that the Indies pharmacologists carried into European print — Garcia de Orta, Monardes, and Cristóvão da Costa, whose Tractado de las Drogas (1578) gives a chapter and a botanical plate to “the Bangue.” It is bangue that Knox carried to Hooke. The hinge of the whole story is a loan-word.
Then came the forgetting. When W. B. O'Shaughnessy published his famous Calcutta studies of “Indian hemp” in the 1840s, and when Moreau de Tours used hashish to model madness in Du hachisch et de l'aliénation mentale (1845), the Victorians hailed it as cannabis entering Western medicine. But Avicenna had catalogued qinnab in the Canon eight centuries earlier; Ibn al-Baytar and the Persian Makhzan al-Adviyah had it; Hooke and Knox had it in 1689. The “discovery” was a re-importation with the sources filed off. (Anna Winterbottom's study of Knox's Ceylon narrative traces exactly how a captive's account became a scientific source.)
By the time Baudelaire is dissolving a spoonful of dawamesc in Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) and Fitz Hugh Ludlow is narrating his visions in The Hasheesh Eater (1857), the same molecule Avicenna prescribed for earache has become a satanic shortcut to a false paradise — and then, with the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1894, an object of imperial bureaucracy. Same plant; opposite verdict; different century.
III. What the Collection Teaches
Lined up end to end, these sixty books make an argument no single one of them makes: that “medicine versus vice” is a cultural verdict, not a property of a plant; that the “respectable” seed and the “dangerous” flower have been split apart in every tradition; and that what Europe called the discovery of cannabis was really the slow, repeated rediscovery of what China, India, and the Islamic world had written down — and what the Pamir herders had burned in their braziers — long before a sea-captain set a sample on Robert Hooke's coffeehouse table.
The books are open to read, in their original Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Italian, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, and English. Browse the whole collection →
Sources and Further Reading
Primary sources in Source Library
- Robert Hooke, Philosophical Experiments and Observations (1726) — “An Account of the Plant called Bangue” (read to the Royal Society, 1689).
- Cristóvão da Costa, Tractado de las Drogas (1578); the Shennong Bencao Jing; the Sushruta Saṃhitā; Edward Lane, Modern Egyptians; Baudelaire, Les Paradis Artificiels — all in the collection.
Secondary scholarship
- Breen, Benjamin. The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019; and “Theire Soe Admirable Herbe,” Public Domain Review (2020).
- Winterbottom, Anna. “Producing and Using the Historical Relation of Ceylon: Robert Knox, the East India Company and the Royal Society.” British Journal for the History of Science 42, no. 4 (2009): 515–538.
- Touw, Mia. “The Religious and Medicinal Uses of Cannabis in China, India and Tibet.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 13, no. 1 (1981): 23–34.
- Russo, Ethan B. “History of Cannabis and Its Preparations in Saga, Science, and Sobriquet.” Chemistry & Biodiversity 4 (2007): 1614–1648.
- Mills, James H. Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800–1928. Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Ren, Meng, et al. “The Origins of Cannabis Smoking: Chemical Residue Evidence from the First Millennium BCE in the Pamirs.” Science Advances 5, no. 6 (2019): eaaw1391.
Produced by J. Derek Lomas of Delft University of Technology using Claude Code. .
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