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

"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."

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.

Read at www.theguardian.com