Laudanum's Long Run: Paracelsus' Secret Pill to Deadly Pharmacy Mix-Ups

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Laudanum is a tincture of about 10 percent powdered opium, roughly 1 percent morphine, dissolved in alcohol, and in the mid 19th century a bottle could cost less than gin. This episode traces the name to the 16th century alchemist Paracelsus, whose secret pain pill reportedly included crushed pearls, musk, and amber, and then to Thomas Sydenham in the 1660s, whose recipe called for opium, saffron, cinnamon, cloves, and sherry. In 1753 the Edinburgh surgeon George Young warned that opium was a poison by which great numbers are daily destroyed, but in an age before germ theory it stopped pain, coughing, and the diarrhea of cholera and dysentery.

Classed as medicine, laudanum avoided the taxes on alcohol and became a working class staple, a surgical sedative before ether and chloroform, and a presence in the lives of Mary Lincoln, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein, and Wilkie Collins. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act required labels, the 1914 Harrison Act and Britain's 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act restricted it, and today it survives as a grandfathered, unapproved Schedule II drug carrying a red poison label.

Coleridge's Kubla Khan and the person from Porlock who interrupted it
Labeling alone cut sales of opiate patent medicines by an estimated 33 percent
Deodorized tincture of opium, made by stripping out the vomiting inducing alkaloid noscapine
Its narrow modern uses for intractable diarrhea and neonatal opioid withdrawal
Laudanum is 25 times stronger than paregoric, and the abbreviation DTO has led to fatal infant overdoses

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