If you think drug addiction is a recent problem, think again! When I read Frankenstein recently I found dr. Victor Frankenstein used laudanum (an alcoholic tincture of opium), and I thought it would make a good post.
A drink of laudanum was made of 10% opium and 90% alcohol, and flavoured with cinnamon or saffran. It was first used by the ancient Greeks, and in the 19th century mostly used as painkiller, sleeping pill, or tranquilizer. It was cheaper then poppy oil and could be drank like you’d drink scotch. It took a while for the Victorian to figure out the negative side effect, only in 1919 the production and export of opium was prohibited, and in 1928 a law was passed that prohibited use.
(Source, in Dutch)
Wikipedia’s list of laudanum-users is so incredibly long, it makes no sense to copy it. Here’s some notable users: Lord Byron (of course!), Kate Chopin (from the ‘The Story of an Hour’ I linked you to recently), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe.
In literature, it’s mentioned in:
Mary Shelley’s character Victor Frankenstein uses laudanum to help him sleep after the death of his friend, Henry Clerval.
In Jack Finney’s Time and Again, the main character, Si Morley, wonders if a live baby in an 1882 display case has been “doped up with one of the laudanum preparations I’d seen advertised in Harpers.”
The character Cassy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin kills one of her children with laudanum to prevent it from growing up in slavery.
In Charles Dickens’ novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood it is the drink of choice for the sinister uncle Jasper.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula Lucy Westenra’s maids are poisoned (though not killed) by Dracula with a dose of laudanum put into wine.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the poem fragment Kubla Khan immediately on waking from a laudanum-induced dream.
So, it was a pretty popular drug. In fact: Innumerable Victorian women were prescribed the drug for relief of menstrual cramps and vague aches and used it to achieve the pallid complexion associated with tuberculosis (frailty and paleness were particularly prized in females at the time). Nurses also spoon-fed laudanum to infants. The Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal died of a laudanum overdose. (Here’s the Wiki article.)
I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.
Karen Halls
[...] Opium – Opium desire or a dream wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt [...]
Laudanum, Absinth, Couchsyrop with Cocaine (invented around the same time)… They don’t rever to that period as “The Great Binch” for nothing.
The favored way to consume Laudanum was adding a few drops to a glass of Absinth, to give the Absinth some extra kick, as shown in the opening sequence of the movie “From Hell” (with Johnny Depp chasing down Jack the Ripper).
Coleridge wrote most of his work completely out of his head. The story I know of Kubla-Khan was Coleridge awoke in a field after a week of binging with the poem in his hand, not remember writing it or how it ended… that is why it was never finished, he didn’t remember how anymore.
Karen, thank you for your support! I have a fun post for this sunday, I hope, so keep an eye on your feedreader :)
I LOVE this blog! Many of the dolls I make are inspired by the Victorian era…I recently made a little aesthete inspired by Wilde.
I’m currently taking a course in Fin-de-Siecle literature and we just finished reading Dracula…I loved it. Have you ever read Thomas DeQuincy’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater?” Another Victorian tale of druggedness…and I just read an article about how EA Poe was fed laudunum by his nurse when he was a baby.
Black-Eyed Suzy, thank you! Your blog is wonderful too, I’ll include it in my blogroll :) I still have to read Thomas deQuincy, it seems a very interesting book!
“Perilous Play” (1869) by Louisa May Alcott
http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Ludlow/Texts/perilous.html
erowid.org/plants
http://www.erowid.org/plants
The Fitz Hugh Ludlow hypertext library
http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Ludlow
We watched From Hell last night and I wanted to find the relevance to the Laudanum being added to the Absinth having just added it to our collection recently which brought me here via Google.
I wanted to add this because I too seemed to have remembered the scene as Dermut mentions it on MArch 2nd 2008 as well… being at the opening.
Wrong.
The opening scene is him preparing Opium then smoking it.
The Absinth scene comes in later, I thought after seeing the opening scene I was then mistaken with my memory till it shows up later maybe 1/2 way into the movie pretty much as I and Dermut remembered it.
[...] had no idea laudanum was such a party drug. And adding it to absinthe..? Beneath their cravats and corsets, they [...]
Hi.
Thanks for your interesting site.
The Victorians must have been as high as kites.
I am a Dickens fan and have just found the film about Edwin Drood on you tube. It really does have the most sinister characters in it.
[...] that is some old man! An opium addict no less. And he drank Laudanum (which I had never heard of) which is an alcoholic tincture of opium that was popular in the 19th [...]
[...] moms have been self-medicating given a emergence of time. During a Victorian era, laudanum (an alcoholic whiff of opium) served as a tranquilizer, sleeping pill, and menstrual cramp remedy. Opium was used in ancient [...]
I’m taking Laudanum on Saturday night with a few friends for the first time …looking forward to it :-))
yup, that sounds SMART. you fucking idiot. look up some of the god damned side effects.
Can’t be near as bad as your damn mouth! That is for sure. Besides, the opium trade is good and well thanks to the us gov and cia and those guarding it for their “masters” in crowns and most likely your past leaders profits…idiot.
Not a good idea one way path to misery it’s smack
Mary Lincoln also was a laudunam user for her migraines. She also used clora hydrate….the use of both of these at the same time might explain her hallucinations and irratic behavior?
A very interesting read! I had no idea laudanum use went back as far as ancient Greece. It makes sense as of course the poppy has existed long before the human race and the ancient Greeks did love their wine! I suppose its only a matter of time until someone utilises the property’s of both; about two thousand years ought to do it!
I was also intrigued by the comments made about absinthe; I’ve written a post about the drink on my blog, having undertaken large exposures to it for the purposes of journalistic accuracy.
Keep up the good work! Rowan.
Ether is used in Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood’.
Thank you for a great post – so intresting and fact-filled. Another famous laudanum addict was Dickens’s friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins. Laudanum features in a number of his books: in the thrilling sensation novel, Armandale, his murderous villainess Lydia Gwilt (fabulous name) is a raging addict! Sherlock Holmes on the other hand famously dislikes opiates and prefers to inject a seven per cent solution of cocaine – different strokes, I suppose!
you folks act like it’s such an “awful” thing, plants were put on God’s green earth for the benefit of man. The only thing is that some in “authority” seem to think the themselves are God and so outlaw it for everyone else and yet use it themselves and send our armies in to guard it. Grow up people and open your eyes to the truth for once instead of acting like little puritans who haven’t a clue what the hell is really going on around you.
Typo alert: I meant Armadale!
Just read a gothic romance by Dorothy Eden where laudanum is featured. Nasty stuff
Just watched the Showtime movie “Creation” about Charles Darwin. It emphasized his hallucinations and even showed him preparing and drinking laudanum.
I’ve nominated you for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award, if you’d like to participate, have a look!
http://www.booksatmiddlemayfarm.wordpress.com! I’ve written a book about a morphine/laudanum addicted soldier and his family post US Civil War. Addiction is very old and interesting.
OPIUM has been around through all the ages. Just in different forms.
[...] twenty years after the war, Lucius is addicted to laudanum, Roger carries the deep psychic wounds of an artist confronted with butchery, and Cass uses alcohol [...]
[...] *Laudanum: a tincture of opium. For an interesting note on the subject, see Laudanum, and its many uses on the Victorian Era blog. Wikipedia, also has a discussion on the [...]
[...] Bizarre cures. With marijuana, cocaine and opium (or Laudenum) all legal in the pharmacies it’s a wonder anyone got anything done. Laudanum was also known [...]
I am doing a thesis on this subject. Does anyone else have any info on MCEscher or Freud using the drug?
In 2013. War seems to be even more inevitable than ever before, it would seem that our leaders and other very high ranking people in the world today. They kind of like the idea of all the massive money to be made from war. Have people thought what the average Joe, is going to do for medications and other ailments. When you’re Dr. cannot be reached, the pharmacy is destroyed. There is no electric to maintain the average household. It is said laudanum can help with dysentery, bring down fevers and comfort people in drastic situations. Our leaders love to scare everybody with the prospect of war, but nobody seems to be taken them serious at this time.
One Salty Dog.
[…] of us, unlike many past artists and writers - Byron, and Keats, amongst others, whose opium and laudanum use fuelled the fire of their poetry – somehow fail to become artistic geniuses under the […]
[…] 19th century cough and cold remedy, “Dr. John Collis Brown’s Chlorodyne,” contained laudanum, which is a mixture of opium, cannabis and chloroform. The medicine was also marketed as a cure […]
it was used for teething babies and also menstrual cramps and also many women used laudanum for abortions just a little fact that was not in the above information