'Unprecedented' discovery: 17th-century mummy brains show evidence of cocaine use
CTV
Preserved brain samples dating back to early 17th-century Milan have tested positive for cocaine, a team of Italian researchers has found, but it's not immediately clear how it got into their systems.
Preserved brain samples dating back to early 17th-century Milan have tested positive for cocaine, a team of Italian researchers has found, but it's not immediately clear how it got into their systems.
The new study from the University of Milan sheds light on the historical spread of the highly addictive drug, previously understood to have emerged in Europe as recently as the 1800s, and famously both used and promoted by prominent figures including psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. But as the August study's findings show, Freud may have been rather behind the times, by as much as nearly 200 years.
It would appear there's a pair of Baroque-era Italian mummies with some explaining to do.
Researchers ran a battery of toxicological tests on specimens recovered from the Ospedale Maggiore, a Milanese hospital and church that operated throughout the 1600s and maintained extensive burial chambers, known as the Ca'Granda crypt.
"This represents an exceptional context from an archaeological, historical, and even toxicological point of view," the study reads. "It is estimated that these chambers contain approximately 2.9 million bones, which represent over 10,000 individuals who perished in the late Renaissance and Modern hospital."
Among the human remains interred in the complex's crypt, scientists examined nine brain samples, and in two of those nine samples, test results showed the presence of cocaine and some of its chemically related substances — a bewildering discovery, as none of the hospital's original records from the time mention the drug or its use.
"Given that the plant was not listed inside the detailed hospital pharmacopeia, it may not have been given as a medicinal remedy but may have been used for other purposes," the study reads.
