opium and the people

Opium and the Workers
of opium which was given to a child was highly variable and could be very large. The usual dose of Godfrey's was said
to be from half a teaspoonful to two teaspoonfuls. Where weighing was erratic and the preparation evaporated to such
an extent that it was much stronger than expected, two or three teaspoonfuls would be `stronger of poison than
anybody knew'. Babies could soon develop tolerance of the drug, and mothers were then tempted to use stronger
preparations, including laudanum itself.7
The same series of parliamentary inquiries which brought to light the issues of opium poisoning, the drug's use as a
suicide agent and its adulteration brought the child `doping' issue forward also. Dr Baker of Derby, in evidence to the
Factory Commission in 1834, early made the connection with a mother's absence at work which was to be a continuing
theme in all discussions. He commented, `many mothers employed in mills are in the habit of giving opiates, such as
Godfrey's cordial, Daffy's elixir, or laudanum, to their infants, that they may sleep during the mother's absence; and I
have traced permanent squinting to this cause...'.,,8 Nottingham, too, was particularly noted for the practice. Women
lace-makers were accustomed to use Godfrey's or laudanum to quiet their children while they worked at the frame.
Lyon Playfair's survey of large towns in Lancashire collected further evidence from Rochdale, Manchester, Wigan,
Bury and other centres. The Provincial Medical and Surgical Association (forerunner of the British Medical
Association), the newly-established Pharmaceutical Society, the short-lived General Board of Health, all became
involved in the question.
The children and opium issue came to a head in the 1860s in line with the wider campaign to control the open sale of
the drug. The medical input, as in the other `public health' issues, was striking, and Sir John Simon's reports were again
particularly telling.
Nearly all the reports to the Privy Council made in this decade had some mention of the infant doping question. The
statistical emphasis already noted in the public health campaign in general was used with telling effect here. Simon's
anxiety about high rates of infant mortality - over twenty-four in every hundred thousand live births in towns like
Wolverhampton, Ashton-under-Lyne, Preston and Whittlesey, twenty-six per 100.000 in Manchester and Wisbech -
concentrated on the unrestricted sale of children's opiates.9 His anxiety was supported by the contemporaneous
publication of Registrar-General's reports. These showed that the major proportion of opium poisoning deaths occurred
among young children, in particular among infants less than one year old. Between 1863 and 1867, 235 such infants
had died, and fifty-six children aged between one and four; 340 children and adults over five had died. An average
20.5 such poisoning deaths per million population occurred in that period among the under-fives; there was a
comparative rate of 7.8 per million among the over-thirty-five age group.'10
The matter was brought up in Commons debate. The medical press was full of it; and infants poisoned by opiates
provided a never-ending stream of patients for doctors anxious to try out the latest treatment methods." The full weight
of the voluntary side of the public health movement was brought to bear. The Manchester and Salford Sanitary
Association gave public lectures in the 1850s and 1860s on `The Injurious Influence of Certain Narcotics upon Human
Life, both Infant and Adult'. On a national level, the Ladies Sanitary Association acted as a propagandist body. Penny
tracts such as `The Massacre of Innocents' and `How to Manage a Baby' (along with `Why Do Not Women Swim?'
and `The Evils of Perambulators') would, it was hoped, improve working-class child-rearing methods. 12 In the
Englishwoman's Journal, the Association expressed its anxiety about doping: `Few but those who have been much
among the poor, know how fearfully mismanaged their little ones are - how the infant shares his mother's dram and all
her food, from red herring to cucumber - how he takes medicine sufficient homeopathically to treat the whole
community - and how finally, an incautiously large dose of laudanum wraps him in the sleep that knows no waking.13
The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science and the statistical societies took up the question.
Professor Taylor added his testimony on the question of children's narcotics. Both in his evidence to the Select
Committee on the Sale of Poisons in 1857 and in his textbook on poisons, he used evidence of infant mortality from
opium to support his general demand for restriction. 14
There were certain assumptions, however, which underlay this campaign. Although it is still common to find Victorian
statements about child doping reproduced in discussions of disease and mortality without further analysis, the
campaign against the practice was full of the class assumptions which did much to mould attitudes to the use of opium
in general. 15 The campaigners assumed that the mother's absence at work was the root cause and that dosing was the
habit of unqualified nurses, in whose care the infants were left. Dr Alfred Wiltshire, a medical inspector for the Privy
Council in the late 1860s, was sure that maternal care was all that was needed to stop the use of cordials. `I think if the
child were kept at home it would not get opiates, but the mother would attend to it.' Nurses, rather than mothers, were
criticized. These repositories of `ignorance, tradition and prejudice' were at fault.16 The child-minder who took in
large numbers of babies and kept them quiet with liberal doses of soothing syrup was a widely disseminated
stereotype."
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