Jacques-Joseph Moreau

Jacques-Joseph Moreau, called Moreau de Tours after the town where he began to study medicine, was a French psychiatrist who treated hashish as an instrument of science. In 1845 he published Du hachisch et de l’aliénation mentale, Hashish and Mental Illness, the first medical book on how a drug acts on the mind. He was also the man who gave Paris writers their hashish, at the gatherings remembered as the Club des Hashischins.

He trained under Jean-Étienne Esquirol, the leading French psychiatrist of the day, at the asylum of Charenton. Esquirol sometimes sent patients to travel abroad and put some of them in Moreau’s care. On such journeys in the late 1830s Moreau saw hashish used in the East and began to take an interest in it.

A drug to study madness

His idea was that a drug which produced in a healthy person something like the symptoms of a mental illness could be used to understand that illness. He tried it first with datura, on which he published a short paper in 1841, and then with hashish.

He gave it as dawamesk, a sweet paste of hashish, or as an extract, with strong black coffee to quicken the effect and hide the taste. He took it himself, gave it to his students, and gave it to patients with different diagnoses, in rising and falling doses. He concluded that the effects depended on the dose and on who took it: they were not the same in a healthy student as in a patient, nor the same in two patients. Hashish, he wrote, let anyone study on himself the disturbances of mental illness.

The book received an honourable mention from the Academy of Medicine and was reviewed in American journals, and it set off trials of cannabis by psychiatrists in other countries. Historians of psychiatry count him among the founders of psychopharmacology. In 1843 he had helped found the journal Annales médico-psychologiques.

The club and the clinic

From about 1844 the hashish sessions at the Hôtel Pimodan on the Île Saint-Louis brought together Moreau, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval and others. For the writers it was an experience to describe; for Moreau, observation. Gautier sketched him at the piano in Turkish costume.

In the 1840s hashish was an ordinary pharmacy medicine in France. When cholera reached Paris in 1848, several hospitals prescribed hashish tincture. Moreau’s book of 1845 belongs to that moment, when French doctors and pharmacists were trying to make cannabis a medicine.

Year	Event
1804	Born on 3 June
Late 1830s	Travels in the East, where he meets hashish
1841	Pamphlet on treating hallucinations with datura
1843	Co-founds the Annales médico-psychologiques
About 1844	The hashish gatherings at the Hôtel Pimodan begin
1845	Du hachisch et de l’aliénation mentale
1884	Dies on 26 June

A century after his book, in 1953, France removed cannabis from the medicines doctors could prescribe, and the drug he had studied in the open became a matter for the police.^[1][2][3][4]