Photo Illustration by Rick Nease / McClatchy Tribune
If you’ve ever wondered what the drug of choice was for nineteenth-century addicts, “In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine, and Patent Medicinesâ€Â has the answers.
Author Barbara Hodgson traces the roots of opium (the dried sap of the poppy) back 2,500 years, but focuses her attention here on its offshoots, laudanum (a mix of wine, opium, saffron and cinnamon) and morphine (opium̢۪s primary alkaloid).
From the book’s very first sentence—“How fitting it is that Morpheus, the God of dreams, should inspire the naming of morphine, one of the most powerful sleep-inducing, dream-making drugs ever knownâ€Â—this short and compelling drug history takes the reader from the early days of the apothecaries to the countless laudanum prescriptions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a vast number of poets and writers flirted with both habit and addiction.
Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning and even Alcott would have been perfect candidates for a nineteenth-century Celebrity Rehab, for they each consumed large quantities of the opiate throughout their relatively short lives.
By the time morphine was discovered in 1805, the laudanum habit had already been around for over a century. But it was the perfection of the hypodermic needle in 1853 that led to widespread morphine use as people began injecting it directly into their bloodstream. (Before, it had been taken orally.)
What started out as a medical treatment administered on the battlefields of the Civil, Crimean, and Franco-Prussian Wars found its way into the sickrooms of the middle class, as well as the hands of a wave of French writers like Maupassant and Baudelaire.
But it wasn’t just the bohemian set who succumbed. Not even famed nurse Florence Nightingale was immune when she wrote to friend Harriet Martineau of “‘a curious new-fangled little operation of putting opium in under the skin.’â€Â
“In the Arms of Morpheusâ€Â is packed with pictures as well, from mug shots to color ads for the “miracleâ€Â cures that pervaded the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lurid paperback covers to stills from early drug movies like “The Devil’s Needleâ€Â (1916).
This informative and entertaining history of drug use ends with the criminalization of opium, and a telling anonymous quote: “‘There was Morphine Sue and the Poppy Face Kid, / Climbed up snow ladders and down they skid.’â€Â