| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days: Narcotic Addiction and Cultural Crisis in the United States, 1870–1920. By Timothy A. Hickman. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. xvi, 190 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-1-55849-565-4. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-1-55849-566-1.)

Timothy A. Hickman's The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days examines the cultural constructions of the American narcotic addict and narcotic addiction after 1870. Although cultural commentators took note of opium addiction beginning in the 1820s, only antebellum temperance and antislavery reformers more critically linked narcotic addiction to other addictions threatening the autonomous, independent citizen so crucial to a republic. In the late nineteenth century, however, a host of critics mounted a more vigorous public campaign— medical, legal, and cultural—against addicts, against specific addictions ("cocanism," "morphineomaniacs"), and against the broad concept of addiction. Hickman links this changed awareness and resultant campaign to beliefs about a "crisis of modernity." Americans were thought to have become more susceptible to the lure of narcotics for two reasons: the mounting pressures of modern life and the fact that modern science made narcotics more available. Critics linked the "modern" disease of neurasthenia to the fast pace of modern life, to railroad travel, and a host of other technologies, all of which they believed made middle-class Americans more susceptible to narcotic addiction.

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