COVE

Sidney Sime labels this illustration “He distinctly saw within himself the drug he had chewed” after H.E. Gowers' article on “Haschisch Hallucinations” in Strand Magazine, December 1905, following a doctor’s drug hallucinations. Two large eyeballs gaze towards a gemstone, amongst a distorted world of “Half animals and half plants” (Gowers 662). Sime’s eye imagery and the light emitted from them is reminiscent of the popular Victorian fears of “new x-ray technology” allowing you to view unseen worlds inside bodies (Atzmon 8). Sime uses rays to “emphasize both revelatory and destructive power in his illustrations” (Atzmon 8). In this case, the rays are a revelatory power that guide us to the source of this unseen world— the drug that “looked like an emerald, from which thousands of sparks were emitted” (Gowers 662). The drug produces hallucinations that cause the doctor’s slip into this distorted realm. Sime seems to invite his turn-of-the-century audience to consider hallucinations, like popular notions of x-rays, to “...do what the human eye and mind could not” (Atzmon 8) and gain sight into unimaginable worlds, which his illustration itself seems to grant viewers.

Works Cited

Atzmon, Leslie. “Forms of Persuasion: The Visual Rhetoric of Design Artifacts”. The Radical Designist. 2008. http://radicaldesignist.unidcom-iade.pt/forms-of-persuasion-the-visual-r...

Gowers, H. E. "Haschisch Hallucinations." Strand Magazine : An Illustrated Monthly. Illustrated by Sidney Sime, vol. 30, no. 180, 1905, pp. 658-662. 

Sime, Sidney. ‘He distinctly saw within himself the drug he had chewed’. "Haschisch Hallucinations" by H.E. Gowers, Strand Magazine : An Illustrated Monthly, vol. 30, no. 180, 1905, pp. 658-662.