***** Caffeine and Opium - for Babies
. . . Opium is the Opiate of the Masses
Pondering this very question, we came across Elia Vallone Chepaitis's Ph.D dissertation during her stint at the University of Connecticut, entitled The Opium of the Children: Domestic Opium and Infant Drugging in Early Victorian England. In it she details many pharmaceutical business practices in Britain's early eighteenth century, including the various names given to opium solutions designed for household use:
Mother's Helper Infant's Quietness Atkinson's Preservative Dalby's Carminative[8] Soothing Syrup Godfrey's Cordial
And various corruptions of the above names. As one might surmise, these concoctions of opium were expressly designed for the purpose of quieting unruly children. The England of the Industrial Revolution was not a particularly pleasant place to live and work in, especially for the lower classes. Eighteen-hour workdays were not uncommon. Contraception was virtually unknown. The accidental bearing of a child would prove grossly inconvenient to its mother; so would the extra cost in feeding and lost sleep due to the infant's cries.
Sedation represented a strenuous attempt by parents, nurses, and drug vendors to tamper with nature and make infant care easy. For some upper- and middle-class women, and for working mothers, conception... [did not] suit their social and work habits... the one group who... did not use opium sedatives were Irish workers in England because they traditionally opposed opium preparations... [instead], Irish immigrants administered alcoholic beverages.[9]
The last mixture on the above list, Godfrey's Cordial, was a mixture of opium and treacle, and the amount of each in the mixture was the object of intense speculation in an 1843 report commissioned by Parliament:[10]
It is often left to the apprentice to concoct, or to the chemist's wife. It stands in a great jug on the counter...
Caught With Your Hands in the Opium Jar
The report notes that, while the cordial enjoyed brisk sales and a high turnover, no one actually kept track of the mixture inside the bottle. Opium, being fat-soluble, does not dissolve easily in water. Thus, over time, the opium might become concentrated in the bottom of the jug by falling out of solution, and he who got the last dose in the bottle might be in for a wild ride, especially if he couldn't even crawl on all fours yet. Additionally, the recommended doses for the various treatments were vague statements like "as necessary". Couple these instructions with the knowledge that many of the lower-class families who purchased the cordial were illiterate, and one very quickly imagines scores of ratty, slothful children getting a dollop of sweet-tasting opiate the moment they acted up. To make matters worse, the Godfrey's Cordial bottle was narrow-necked and very distinctive-looking; infants recognized it easily. Chepaitis cites another Parliamentary report that quotes apothecaries as saying,
I have seen little children in the shop put the neck of the bottle in their mouths and bite the cork, so fond are they of the preparation.
Another noted that children old enough to buy bottles for their parents from the store
... could not resist the temptation of drinking it until the whole was consumed before reaching home, so that the mothers were obliged to come for it themselves.[11]
In another Parliamentary report, a seamstress named Mary Colton was able to drug her child for two days a week on 1/96 of her weekly paycheck, which made administering such a cordial economically feasible. For example, a working mother making $20,000 in 1998 dollars would be paying roughly twelve bucks a week to keep her child quiet. The sedated toddler allowed Mary to work her normal job and put food on the table, and he was too zonked to get himself into trouble. As Chepaitis puts it,
Infants were drugged at mid-day when mothers could not leave work to breastfeed them, and again when parents returned home exhausted from work. They were often unable or unwilling to share their little disposable time and their modest domestic haven with an active youngster. Since they could not put the little child out in the street, it was easier to sedate him again than to try to bully him into silence and immobility.
Thus, time constraints brought on by the booming of industry forced generations of children into opium dependency. Sweet-tasting drugs allowed the same children to dose themselves effectively, and bypass the need for parents altogether. Until, that is, the subject of nutrition is approached.
Next week: nipple liniment and baby farms! [Editor's Note: It is one of the great tragedies of modern times that we do not remember why we wrote this line. One presumes there was a great story to come, but it has, alas, been lost in the sands of time.] . . .
<http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/caffeine/> *****
***** The Social Ramifications of Opium Use in 19th Century England by Lea Smalls
. . . Children in the nineteenth-century were also subjected to the opium problem. Parents with teething children, mostly poor parents, used opium-based cures for the pain. According to the parliamentary papers, item 38, reports that deaths by poison, between the years 1836-1839 numbered more than 30 (11). These are the deaths that are directly related to the ingestion of opium, as opposed to some children's prolonged use and subsequent death by starvation due to lack of food.
Some deaths were due to the lack of a qualified druggist, and the consequent inconsistency of actual doses. One coroner's report indicates the coroner was convinced that children are dying due to neglect in dispensing opium, "I have no doubt whatever that many are yearly destroyed by it...but who dying off gradually, never come under my notice as coroner" (12). Another coroner's report directly blames the druggist. In investigating the death of a female child, one year and eleven months, the coroner reports, "In this case there appeared very great negligence on the part of the person who sold the laudanum; he had not been brought up as a druggist, but had latterly taken to the business, and employed two young girls to attend his shop and sell drugs in his absence...I ascertained personally at the shop that one of them sold twice as much for a penny as the other" (13). This first-hand report reinforces the fact that children were indeed dying, and some without notice. Paregoric, a favorite to soothe teething pain, often was administered with no regard for dosing. One coroner's remarks after an inquest writes, "The deceased was very cross and restless cutting her teeth and her mother sent to a neighbor for laudanum...she sent a teaspoonful and gave it to the deceased not knowing its poisonous effects...Sarah Percival died about two hours later" (14). Again Gaskell's novel Mary Barton illustrates how children were purposely given opium to keep them quiet. Gaskell's narrator says "Many a penny that would have gone little way enough in oatmeal or potatoes, bought opium to still little ones, and make them forget their uneasiness in heavy troubled sleep" (15). Dosing regulations were severely lacking, resulting in an abundance of opium deaths. From the druggist, to his staff, to the mother, dosing irregularities and death were more frequent than correct usage. . . .
<http://www.gober.net/victorian/reports/opium.html> *****
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, _Mary Barton_: <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=2153>
***** Opium Opium History, 1858 To 1940
By Alfred W. McCoy
High Imperial Opium Trade (1858-1907)
During the latter half of the 19th century, opium became a major global commodity. Across the Asian opium zone, from the Balkans to Manchuria, there was a steady increase of local opium cultivation and consumption. Moreover, in the latter half of the 19th century, the modern pharmaceutical industry made opiates a drug of mass abuse in the cities of the West--Europe, the Americas, and Australia.
By the early 20th century, opium and its derivatives, morphine and heroin, had become a major global commodity equivalent in scale to other drugs such as coffee and tea.
In retrospect, the growth of mass narcotics abuse in the West seems part of the transformation of diet and health care in the late 19th century. In an era when Western medicine had still not developed genuine therapeutic remedies, self-medication with opium and the profession's reliance on morphine injection encouraged drug abuse.
Indeed, opium was a genuinely effective against the gastrointestinal diseases that were epidemic in the cities of 19th Century England and America. Introduced to skeptical American doctors in 1856, the hypodermic syringe proved an effective means of relieving pain with morphine injection, and by 1881 many physicians used the drug as a panacea for wide range of illness.
With the approval of the medical profession, Western pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Bayer and Parke-Davis began selling substantial quantities of opiates and coca in the form of popular remedies. Such successful marketing made mass addiction to cocaine and heroin a significant feature of late 19th century life in the West.
Soon after the Bayer Company introduced heroin as a non-addictive substitute for morphine in 1898, the American Medical Association (AMA), continuing the profession's long reliance on opiate medications, initially endorsed the new drug as safe for respiratory ailments.
The spread of mass addiction was part of a new diet in the industrial nations based on a global trade in proteins and stimulants. After a century of constant dietary habits, the average Englishman's consumption of sugar, jumped four-fold from 1850 to 1900. During the same period, England's per capita consumption of tea increased three-fold.
Similarly, in the United States between 1865 and 1902 coffee consumption increased nearly three-fold, while sugar jumped four-fold. The simple 18th century diet of milled grains had given way to one spiced with large quantities of protein (eggs and beef), glucose (sugar), and stimulants (coffee and tea).
If an energized diet of proteins, glucose and caffeine could be used to stimulate the body through a long working day, then narcotic-based medicines could be used to relax it in the short hours of rest.
Paralleling the growth of sugar and coffee use, American consumption of opium rose over four-fold from the 1840s to the 1890s, and the number of addicts peaked at 313,000 in 1896. In the United Kingdom, sales of patent medicines, most of them opium-based, increased almost seven-fold between 1850 and 1905. Significantly, the average consumption of opium per 1,000 population increased from 1.3 pounds in 1827 to over 10 pounds 50 years later. . . .
<http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/opi010.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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