Mescal. The 'Divine' Plant and its Psychological Effects. With an Introduction by MacDonald Critchley.

First edition of the first monograph in English on the psychoactive properties of mescal. Experimenting on himself, Klüver painstakingly recorded the effects, cross-referencing with previous accounts, in an attempt to codify the experience. Laudatory introduction by the pre-eminent British neurologist of the era. Fairly well represented institutionally but commercially elusive. In the publisher's influential, but fragile, Psyche Miniatures series. Heinrich Klüver (1897-1979) was one of the twentieth century's most widely influential scientists, a pioneer in the fields of psychology, neuroanatomy, and psychochemistry, "Klüver's early interests were in eidetic imagery By chance Klüver stumbled upon a reference in the literature, by W. Jaensch in 1921, to a plant that, upon ingestion, was capable of generating eidetic phenomena in non-eidetic individuals With some help from his friend, the prominent psychophysicist Samuel Fernberger, Klüver came into possession of the plant, and on October 18, 1925, consumed it [He] would get much more out of his 'experiment' (as he called it) than he had imagined The sensory phenomena it induced were so profound that he would boldly declare: 'The importance of mescal for psychological research cannot be questioned.' He would publish multiple works detailing his experiments on himself and others with the plant, perhaps most famously his 1928 monograph" [Davoli p. 318]. Christopher C. Davoli, "Neurognostics Question: Heinrich Klüver's 'Divine' Plant", in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Vol. 16, no. 3, 2007. Small octavo (153 x 94 mm). Original vivid red cloth-backed pale buff paper boards, paper label to spine printed in red, front cover also lettered in red. Lightly rubbed and soiled, top corners bumped; text-block a touch toned; small cinnabar red inkan to the front free endpaper; a very good copy.…