Descending into the grand vaulted crypt of a centuries-old hospital in Milan in 2019, Gaia Giordano felt overwhelmed.
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“You see a bone floor, full of bones,” said Giordano, a graduate student at the University of Milan.
In the 17th century, the crypt served as a cemetery for thousands of poor Milanese who had sought help at the Ca’ Granda hospital. More recently, Giordano uncovered a surprising twist in the history of European drug trafficking there.
After analyzing the skulls and brain tissue of nine people buried there, Giordano and his collaborators discovered that two of them had most likely been using cocaine. The findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, offer the earliest evidence of cocaine use in premodern Europe —about 200 years before a German chemist isolated the drug from the coca plant.
The findings suggest that the Milanese had access to the same coca leaves that ancient South American civilizations had long used as a pain reliever, stimulant and appetite suppressant.
Nobody knows how or when coca reached Europeans. But Christine VanPool, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, believes that Spanish colonizers in South America may have been attracted to cocaine’s analgesic properties.
Benjamin Breen, a historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said the leaves may have been sent back to Europe by an apothecary or doctor.
And Milan, as the epicenter of the trade, may have received coke before other European cities.
Chronicles left by 16th century European travelers to the New World mention coca leaves. For example, the Spanish missionary José de Acosta wrote that chewing coca leaves works with great strength and gives encouragement to the Indians.”
The crypt at Ca’ Granda includes some 2.9 million bones. Giordano said “ethical, technical and time constraints” limited the remains she and her team could study. The remains of two people showed evidence of cocaine ingestion. The samples were converted into powder, analyzed with a spectrometer to detect the compounds they contained.
One of those cocaine users was a man between 30 and 45 years old who had suffered from syphilis. The other person’s age, sex and medical condition were impossible to determine.
The two people could have chewed coca leaves “as a medicinal remedy in the hospital,” Giordano and his colleagues wrote in the study. But they could also have taken it recreationally.
Hospital records showed no evidence to suggest that doctors administered coca leaves there. In contrast, an earlier study by Giordano’s team found that as early as 1558 poppy products were “actively used as a medical treatment” at Ca’ Granda.
Giordano’s research appears to upset the earliest estimate of when the coca leaf first crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
“Much of what we know about the past has been based on information from written records. But if we compare what’s in a book with physical evidence, like what’s in someone’s brain, we’re talking about a whole new dimension,” Breen said.
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