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morphine habitués
Addict Doctors and Drug Abuse in Denmark, 1870–1955
Jesper Vaczy Kragh, ph.d., Medical Museion, Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen
In the 1870s, the term «morphinism» (morfinisme) was coined and entered into the vocabulary of Danish
psychiatry. From this period and onwards, the users of morphine and other psychotropic drugs were mainly
treated in Danish mental hospitals. Patient records of mental hospitals show that a fairly large group of
patients in the hospitals were diagnosed as drug abusers, and that physicians constituted a substantial
part of these inmates. However, there is a dearth of historical research about the medical doctors who were
admitted for drug abuse treatment. This article will discuss the role of the addict physicians in the history of
drug abuse in Denmark.
Two histories of addiction
Two very different narratives about drug abuse can be
found in the Danish literature on the subject. The first
one is well known and can be summed up in a few words:
psychotropic drugs were introduced in the late 1960s,
when groups of counterculture rebels began experimenting
with heroin and other narcotics, but this experimental
and recreational use of drugs turned into a social problem
which still persists today. As the Danish National Health
Service notes in its latest report on The Drug Situation in
Denmark, most drug abusers suffer from a lack of education,
and are unemployed and homeless. 1
The second narrative, on the other hand, is unfamiliar
to most people today. According to this narrative, drug
abuse was not a phenomenon of the 1960s, but of the
1870s, when the use of morphine and other opiates became
a problem for certain groups of Danes. These
groups, however, did not belong to the lowest strata of
society. Rather, it was, as psychiatrist Knud Pontoppidan
observed in his doctoral dissertation Chronic Morphinism
(1883), «almost exclusively from the upper class or
the well educated middle class that the morphinists are
recruited, and it is an exception if we see morphinism in
working class communities». 2 Pontoppidan further observed
that several medical professionals were among the
chronic morphinists.
Whereas drug addiction
of the 1960s and onwards
has been the subject
of study, no Danish
scholars have yet examined
the history of drug
abuse in the period from
the late nineteenth century
to the 1950s. 3 It is,
consequently, an open
question what made
people use drugs such as
morphine in this period,
and why Pontoppidan’s
patients apparently had
a completely different
social profile from their
fellow drug users of the
1960s and 1970s.
Chief physician Knud Pontoppidan
of the Municipal Mental
Hospital (Kommunehospitalet)
in Copenhagen. Author of the
first Danish doctoral dissertation
on chronic morphinism (Den
kroniske Morphinisme) in 1883.
(Medical Museion)
Historiography
Although Danish literature on the history of drug abuse is
very sparse, international studies are comprehensive and
extensive. Since the 1970s, a series of monographs, dissertations
and articles on the history of drug abuse have