Coca is a biological, psychotropic drug derived from a medical plant. The story of coca and cocaine has been told many different times. Recently, Bettina Wahrig analysed the narratives in coca research and focused on the history of coca leaves and cocaine in the second half of nineteenth-century Europe. The first coca leaves came to Europe from South America in the 1750s. More than a century later, in 1859/60, Albert Niemann isolated the active components of coca leaves in Friedrich Wöhler's laboratory in Göttingen. He baptized this new alkaloid cocaine. The isolation of the active substance in these ‘miraculous leaves’ was important not only for the chemical purification and standardization of this biologic. It also provided the substance with a new potential of becoming a drug ‘looking for diseases’. Reports focusing on the ‘miraculous effects’ of the Indian plant started to circulate in the European medical press just as cocaine was isolated from the leaves. Notably, the Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza published on this topic after returning to Italy from a stay in Argentina in 1859, henceforth transforming the Andean coca leaves into an ‘Italian cure-all’.

But coca and cocaine, respectively, were never conclusively stabilized. These substances and the narratives that attached meaning to them and their effects travelled through numerous networks and across quite different contexts and fields of interest.