author
H. H. (Harry Hubbell) Kane
1854–1906
A New York physician-writer from the late 1800s, he explored the hidden worlds of opium, morphine, and hashish use in books that mixed medical warning with vivid social observation. His best-known writing opens a window onto drug culture and public health fears in Gilded Age America.
1 Audiobook
Drugs that enslave : The opium, morphine, chloral and hashisch habits
by H. H. (Harry Hubbell) Kane
About the author
Working as a physician in New York, Harry Hubbell Kane wrote practical and often strikingly direct books about narcotics, addiction, and medical treatment in the late nineteenth century. Records for his published works identify him as H. H. Kane, M.D., born in 1854, and show a career focused on subjects that many writers of his time treated only in whispers.
His books include The Hypodermic Injection of Morphia (1880), Drugs That Enslave (1881), Opium-Smoking in America and China (1882), and The Sick-Room, a manual on nursing. He is also remembered for A Hashish-House in New York, an account that helped make his name recognizable to later readers interested in the stranger corners of nineteenth-century city life.
Today, Kane is chiefly read for the way his work sits between medicine, journalism, and social history. He wrote with the urgency of a doctor trying to explain dangerous habits, but his pages also preserve rare details about everyday life, vice, and reform-era anxieties in the United States.