J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

Turner’s note reads: ‘med | The Herb Stramonium: | smoke 2 or 3 pipes every day | swallow the saliva’.

Datura stramonium has medicinal properties but is also a powerful hallucinogenic, with unpredictable or even fatal results for the uninitiated. Professor Brian Livesley has kindly drawn the author’s attention to a paper by Alexander Marcet (1770–1822), physician at Guy’s Hospital,1 in 1816, summarising its former use and misuse. Marcet notes that ‘inhalation of the smoke of the Datura Stramonium for the relief of asthma, a practice introduced within these few years, is, I believe, in some instances attended with unquestionable benefits, and is frequently resorted to’. It is ‘cultivated in some English gardens for the purpose ... chopped into small pieces and smoked like tobacco’. When ‘taken internally in the form of extract [stramonium] has appeared to relieve acute pains’, notably sciatica, joint pain and cancers. As an example of its dangers, Marcet cites the effects on boys in Chester; ‘blindness, and a kind of madness, biting, scratching, shrieking, laughing, and crying in a frightful manner’.2 In a famous earlier episode, British troops serving at Jamestown, Virginia in 1676 had to be confined for eleven days after eating it in a salad.

Anthony Bailey speculates on Turner’s ‘homoeopathic’ use of the drug while James Hamilton ascribes some of the more turbid poetry in this sketchbook to an overdose, occasioning visions and ‘prolonged disorientation’. In a recent discussion of John Keats, Livesley suggests: ‘It is, perhaps, in relation to Keats’ failed and much criticised poem Endymion [1817/18] we need to reflect that the effects of datura and other herbs can last for days.’3