Why Mothers Gave Babies Opium

In Victorian Britain, you could buy opium in a corner shop for a penny. In America, a teething syrup for babies was made with morphine. And Bayer sold heroin as a cough medicine. So why would a mother who loved her baby give it opium? The easy answer is that nobody knew better. But opium was no secret. Laudanum, which is opium dissolved in alcohol, was the household medicine for coughs, pain and upset stomachs. As one person put it at the time, everyone had laudanum at home. Godfrey's Cordial, opium sweetened with treacle, kept babies quiet while their mothers worked. What nobody had was a label that said how much was too much. Mary Colton, a twenty-year-old lace worker in Nottingham, told her own story: a drop or two more at a time, until it reached a teaspoonful. And historians now think the biggest danger often wasn't the overdose. A doctor at the time wrote that a baby kept drugged is "disinclined for food." The bottle that stopped the crying had switched off the only alarm a hungry baby has. Over the next sixty years, three things changed. Britain's 1868 Pharmacy Act, which had a hole in it. A new drug: morphine, then heroin, advertised as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. And a journalist, Samuel Hopkins Adams, whose 1905 series "The Great American Fraud" helped bring about the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. That law banned nothing. It made the label tell the truth. 💬 Find a medicine bottle in your home. What does its label tell you that a mother in 1850 never got to read? 🔔 Subscribe for more of how ordinary life used to work — Yesterday's Normal. CHAPTERS: 0:00 Opium for a penny, morphine for babies 0:31 Did they really not know? 1:01 A night in a mill town 1:34 Mary Colton tells her own story 2:09 The danger nobody talks about 2:35 Who was to blame? 3:03 A law, a drug, and a journalist 3:20 The 1868 Pharmacy Act 3:39 The hole in the law 4:04 Opium to morphine 4:26 Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup 4:37 Bayer, aspirin, and heroin 5:11 Why the newspapers stayed quiet 5:45 The Great American Fraud 6:13 The 1906 law that banned nothing 6:52 A label can't stop you 7:14 So why did she give it opium? 📚 RESEARCH & SOURCES — every source named in full, so you can check any claim: ▸ Opium sold beside the groceries before 1868, twenty drops of laudanum for a penny, "everyone had laudanum at home," Mary Colton's account, the Manchester coroner's verdict, the 235 recorded infant deaths of 1863–67, Section 16 of the Pharmacy Act, and the fall in the death rate by 1871 — Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, "Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England" (1981), chapters 3, 9 and 10. ▸ Godfrey's Cordial, "the poor child's nurse," and starvation rather than overdose — Science Museum blog (2012), on the addictive history of medicine. ▸ Sertürner isolates morphine, 1804 — "Morphine," Wikipedia. ▸ Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, Bangor, Maine, 1845, and unlisted ingredients — State Library of Queensland blog; "Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup," Wikipedia. ▸ "Baby Killers" — American Medical Association, "Nostrums and Quackery" (1911). Full text on archive.org. ▸ Hoffmann makes aspirin and heroin within two weeks, 1897 — Science History Institute, "Felix Hoffmann." ▸ Heroin sold as a cough suppressant and a "non-addictive morphine substitute," its addiction rate, and the 1914 and 1924 US laws — "Heroin," Wikipedia. ▸ Cheney's red-letter contract clause, and "the opium-containing soothing syrups, which stunt or kill helpless infants" — Samuel Hopkins Adams, "The Great American Fraud," Collier's Weekly (1905). Free on Project Gutenberg. ▸ The 1906 labelling rules — "Pure Food and Drug Act," Wikipedia. The one-third fall in sales — David Musto, "The American Disease" (1999), via "History of United States drug prohibition," Wikipedia. ———————————————————— They didn't love their babies any less than you'd love yours. They just had nobody standing between them and the bottle. RELATED TOPICS: opium babies, Victorian opium, heroin cough medicine, when heroin was legal, Bayer heroin, history of heroin, history of morphine, laudanum, Godfrey's Cordial, Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup, patent medicine, quack medicine, Victorian medicine, Pharmacy Act 1868, Pure Food and Drug Act 1906, Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud, Felix Hoffmann, Friedrich Sertürner, history of medicine, history of drugs, 19th century, social history #history #victorianera #medicalhistory #patentmedicine #19thcentury #socialhistory #explainer #animation