From monkey elixir to fentanyl: Tyler Skaggs's death is merely a chapter in baseball's 136-year drug fix

In August 1889, worn-down Pittsburgh pitcher James 'Pud' Galvin received injections of the Brown-Sequard elixir, an animal-testicle extract promoted by French-Mauritian doctor Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard as restorative and virility-enhancing. Galvin pitched a five-hit shutout the next day and produced strong offensive results, prompting enthusiastic press endorsement and public demonstrations. Contemporary observers did not label the treatment cheating; instead they saw it as pushing endurance and willpower. Brown-Sequard's colleagues soon questioned the tonic's efficacy, but the episode marks baseball's earliest documented chemical experiment and foreshadows later pharmacological performance-enhancement controversies. It occurred long before steroids, amphetamines, and fentanyl became central to later sports doping controversies.

"Before steroids, before amphetamines and before fentanyl, baseball's first documented chemical dalliance came from monkey testicles. In August 1889, a worn-down pitcher for the Pittsburgh Alleghenys named James Francis Pud Galvin, so nicknamed for his once-devastating ability to reduce hitters to pudding, was in need of a spark. He was 32, his right arm a rubbery relic of nearly 5,000 innings pitched, his career on the fade."

"A French-Mauritian doctor by the name of Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard published a paper The Effects Produced on Man by the Subcutaneous Injections of a Liquid Obtained from the Testicles of Animals in which he claimed that a few drops of an extract sourced from dogs and guinea pigs might well make ordinary men stronger and more virile. Galvin, a stocky power pitcher, wasted no time getting jabbed with the so-called Brown-Sequard elixir"

"The next day he pitched a five-hit shutout to turn back the Boston Beaneaters, adding a double and a triple at the plate off the great Old Hoss Radbourn for good measure. (Take that, Ohtani.) Pud Galvin threw a five-hit shutout on 13 April 1889. Photograph: Washington Post If there still be doubting Thomases who concede no virtue of the elixir, they are respectfully referred to Galvin's record in yesterday's Boston-Pittsburg game, wrote the Washington Post, with proto-advertorial flourish. It is the best proof yet furnished of the value of the discovery."

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