Review: 'Seven Sisters of Sleep' by Mordecai Cooke

Originally published in 1860 'The Seven Sisters of Sleep' is a Western classic of drug literature. In over a hundred years, with no reprints until the end of the 20th century, the transformation in the importance of Mordecai Cooke's book is exceptional. Titled in its first edition with a 'popular history of the seven prevailing narcotics of the world' it now carries the tagline 'the celebrated drug classic'. And with good cause.

The book begins with a most poetic of openings. A short story, a fable possibly, which gives its premise over as the title of the book. Accordingly, Sleep had seven sisters who were jealous of her gift, which she waved over the creatures of earth "from pole to pole, and from ocean to ocean, she swayed her sceptre." They tried to steal the sway but they bred discord. So Sleep said: "My minister of dreams shall aid you by his skill, and visions more gorgeous, and illusions more splendid, than ever visited a mortal beneath my sway." And the seven sisters became entwined in their own splendour with the cultures of earth...