The English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had…

The English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning had begun taking morphine for pain relief at age fifteen (which she will takes for four decades until her death in 1861), although this seems not to impede her ability to write “poetical paragraphs”.

In 1857, the American writer Julia Ward Howe suggests that her genius is attributable to her use of the drug, provoking Robert Browning to enter into a heated literary argument defending his wife’s talent.