Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow  

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Freud wrote glowingly about cocaine until he tried to cure the morphine dependency of his colleague Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow with cocaine, but instead turned Fleishl into a cocaine addict. Fleishl died from a cocaine overdose.

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Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow (18461891) was an Austrian physiologist and physician who became known for his important investigations on the electrical activity of nerves and the brain. He was also a creative inventor of new devices which were widely adopted in clinical medicine and physiological research.

Marxow studied medicine in the University of Vienna, Austria. He started his scientific career as a research assistant in the laboratory of Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke (1819–1892), and later as an assistant, in the same University, to the eminent pathologist Carl von Rokitansky (1804–1878). Unfortunately, an accident while he was dissecting a cadaver injured his thumb, which became infected and had to be amputated, interrupting his activities in anatomical pathology. Thus, he had to turn to Physiology, and he came back to von Brücke's laboratory in Vienna after studying for a year with Carl Ludwig (1816–1895), another famous physiologist at the University of Leipzig, Germany, obtaining his doctoral degree in Medicine in 1874.

For many years, Marxow labored under intense personal suffering, due to chronic painful complications of his amputation. Because of this, he became an addict of morphine and heroin (a synthetic derivative of morphine, but much stronger). One of his most intimate friends was Sigmund Freud, then a Viennese neurologist, who was studying at the time the medical properties of cocaine. Freud was convinced that cocaine could be used as mild euphoriant, aphrodisiac and analgesic, and that it could be used to treat morphine addicts. He recommended this to his friend Marxow, who then got a much worse addiction to cocaine. Devastated by pain and disease, he died on October 22, 1891 at only 45 years of age. In light of his heroin and cocaine use, von Fleischl-Marxow may have been the first person to experience a speedball and perhaps the first to die from one. Freud was much affected by guilt afterwards, as a result from this episode.

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