Mescaline became a popular sensation in the mid-twentieth century through Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception", after which the word "psychedelic" was coined to describe it. Its story, however, extends deep into prehistory: the earliest Andean c...

At the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, founded in the closing years of the eighteenth century, dramatic experiments with gases precipitated not only a revolution in scientific medicine but also in the history of ideas. Guided by the energy of maver...