![]() Advances in medicine and public health played a role: acceptance of the germ theory of disease, vaccines, x-rays, and the debut of new pain relievers, such as aspirin in 1899. Only around 1895, at the peak of the epidemic, did doctors begin to slow and reverse the overuse of opiates. Financial pressures mattered too: demand for morphine from well-off patients, competition from other doctors and pharmacies willing to supply narcotics. “In the 19th century, when a physician decided to recommend or prescribe an opiate for a patient, the physician did not have a lot of alternatives,” said Courtwright in a recent interview. But many doctors were slow to heed them, because of inadequate medical education and a shortage of other treatments. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, medical journals filled with warnings about the danger of morphine addiction. Frederick Heman Hubbard in his 1881 book, The Opium Habit and Alcoholism. “Uterine and ovarian complications cause more ladies to fall into the habit, than all other diseases combined,” wrote Dr. By the late 1800s, women made up more than 60 percent of opium addicts. Male doctors turned to morphine to relieve many female patients’ menstrual cramps, “diseases of a nervous character,” and even morning sickness. “Physicians prescribed them for a wide range of indications, and pharmacists sold them to individuals medicating themselves for physical and mental discomforts.” “In 1890, opiates were sold in an unregulated medical marketplace,” wrote Caroline Jean Acker in her 2002 book, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control. Opiates made up 15 percent of all prescriptions dispensed in Boston in 1888, according to a survey of the city’s drug stores. “Doctors and patients alike were tempted to overuse.” “Though it could cure little, it could relieve anything,” he wrote. The hypodermic syringe, introduced to the United States in 1856 and widely used to deliver morphine by the 1870s, played an even greater role, argued Courtwright in Dark Paradise. “Even if a disabled soldier survived the war without becoming addicted, there was a good chance he would later meet up with a hypodermic-wielding physician,” Courtright wrote. An unknown number of soldiers returned home addicted, or with war wounds that opium relieved. The Union Army alone issued nearly 10 million opium pills to its soldiers, plus 2.8 million ounces of opium powders and tinctures. The Civil War helped set off America’s opiate epidemic. A doctor gave laudanum, a tincture of opium mixed with alcohol, to Alexander Hamilton after his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. Benjamin Franklin took opium late in life to cope with severe pain from a bladder stone. During the American Revolution, the Continental and British armies used opium to treat sick and wounded soldiers. Opium’s history in the United States is as old as the nation itself. Today, doctors are re-learning lessons their predecessors learned more than a lifetime ago. Before 1900, the typical opiate addict in America was an upper-class or middle-class white woman. “It’s almost as if someone had handed them a magic wand.”īy 1895, morphine and opium powders, like Ox圜ontin and other prescription opioids today, had led to an addiction epidemic that affected roughly 1 in 200 Americans. Courtwright, author of Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America. ![]() “Doctors were really impressed by the speedy results they got,” says David T. Injected with a hypodermic syringe, the medication relieved pain, asthma, headaches, alcoholics’ delirium tremens, gastrointestinal diseases and menstrual cramps. Physicians like Schuppert used morphine as a new-fangled wonder drug. ![]() “This acted like a charm, as he came to in a minute from the stupor he was in and rested very easily.” “I gave him an injection of morphine subcutaneously of ½ grain,” Schuppert wrote in his casebook. It was the late 1870s, and Schuppert, like thousands of American doctors of his era, turned to the most effective drug in his kit. Charles Schuppert, a New Orleans surgeon, was summoned to help. The man was bleeding, wounded in a bar fight, half-conscious. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |