Plague and intoxicants in the Baltic and North seas during the long seventeenth century

The article argues that medical responses to plague contributed to the ‘psychoactive revolution’ during the long seventeenth century. Focusing on four metropoles in the Baltic and North Sea region, it shows that the commodification of sugar, opiates, and tobacco during the last century of the Second Great Pandemic correlates both with outbreaks of plague in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Stockholm and with the intraregional prescription of these intoxicants in popular and authorised plague physic. In so doing, it argues for the importance of household consumption practices in driving the psychoactive revolution and points to the importance of women and well as men in the popularisation of intoxicants. By tracing the popularisation of sugar, tobacco and opium from c. 1600 and using plague physic as an example of medical prescription more generally it delineates an under-appreciated set of consumer motives informing household consumption practices: not least the need to allay fear, pain, and bodily and mental disorder. The article concludes by introducing the concept of ‘accustomisation’ as the way in which contemporary observers explained how reactive consumption in the face of epidemics could become habitual, recreational, and possibly involuntary consumption over time.