One of the first research rabbit holes I fell down when researching for Seventh Daughter involved drugs. Not the recreational kind, you understand, the lower working classes generally used alcohol for that in the 1930s. Prior to the Great War, there were no restrictions on opium, cocaine, or cannabis, but people used them medicinally rather than recreationally. The public were free to dose themselves as they saw fit, and with no NHS, they turned to pharmacists for advice. The Poisons and Pharmacy act of 1908 allowed pharmacists to sell what they wished to who they wished as long as they recorded names and addresses in a poisons register where necessary. When war broke out, shops sold medical kits as presents for soldiers going to the front. These included opium and cocaine for use as pain relief, drugs most men would have been familiar with.
In 1916, there was a moral panic over soldiers developing drug habits when using medical kits given to them as presents. Despite this, there is little evidence that recreational drug use was a problem in the trenches, or at home. Nevertheless, on 11 May 1916, the Army Council added regulation 40B to the Defence Of The Realm Act, banning the sale of cocaine, opium, Indian Hemp and other psychoactive drugs to troops without a prescription. That July, the public were banned from possessing cocaine and opium without a doctor’s prescription. There were very few prosecutions, but the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 made the legislation law, and in 1928, cannabis was added to the list of restricted drugs. Opium was still legally available from pharmacists in the form of Laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol, and paregoric, a camphorated tincture of opium. The working classes used both for pain, coughs, colds, flu, toothache, teething, insomnia, stomach disorders and diarrhoea well into the 1940s. In fact, opium tincture is still available in the UK today, and is an ingredient in Gees Linctus.
I found a wonderful research document in the Kent Academic Repository, detailing how the working classes used Laudanum and paregoric in the first half of the twentieth century and how cheap and easily available they were. In fact, one pharmacist interviewed for the research said that laudanum and paregoric were ‘very popular, particularly after the advent of the Dangerous Drugs Act.‘ Presumably, because poor people rarely wasted money paying to see a doctor and would no longer have been able to get opium or cocaine to treat their ailments.
In 1931, a bottle of laudanum in a kitchen cupboard was as common as a bottle of aspirin today, especially in the cupboard of a battered wife who regularly had to cope with the pain her husband dished out. The more I researched the use of opiates and the laws enacted to stop them, the more those laws reminded me of the prohibition in America. Alcohol was undoubtedly an issue for a few, but prohibiting it didn’t change that. It simply drove it underground and created a whole new set of problems. Maybe society would have been better off leaving well alone.
If used too often, laudanum was addictive. It influenced many famous writers and poets of the nineteenth century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the drug to ease the pain of his rheumatic illness and became addicted to it. ‘So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at anything, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys.’ His unfinished poem, Kubla Khan, resulted from a laudanum-fuelled dream, and a later poem The Pains of Sleep, recalls his withdrawal from the drug. The dangers of addiction and overdose were well known, but the majority used laudanum and paregoric sensibly, just as most use painkillers sensibly today. Even so, there were accidental overdoses, and it was a popular means of suicide and maybe even murder.
I was also interested in the drugs used during childbirth in the 1930s. Modern women are offered an array of painkillers during labour. In 1931, the few available weren’t necessarily safe or accessible to working-class women. In 1847, Queen Victoria’s obstetrician, James Young Simpson, gave her chloroform to dull her labour pains. This was the beginning of the modern medicalisation of childbirth, but only for the rich. Using chloroform did not cut the rates of infection or death during childbirth, but it did lead to more medical intervention. It also made more money for doctors.
Although chloroform became popular with wealthy women, there was still a great deal of resistance to the use of painkillers during labour. Pain was seen as natural. Suffering was a reminder from God of the sin of sex and its consequences. Chloroform was called ‘a decoy of Satan,’ and the bible was quoted, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ Sex was a sin and childbirth was the punishment. Oddly, this only applied to women.
In 1899, Dr Schneiderlin used hyoscine (scopolamine) and morphine as an aesthetic during surgery. In Germany in 1903, Carl Gauss and Bernhardt Kronig experimented with different dosages and ingredients and developed a method they called Twilight Sleep for childbirth. Magazines and books promised ‘painless childbirth’ and soon it became so popular that even doctors who had no proper training were offering it to their wealthy patients. Errors were made. Women and babies died. Doctors and drug companies made money and the importance of midwives diminished. Twilight Sleep was not the panacea it was made out to be. It did not make labour and birth painless, it merely made women forget. It also led to more hospital confinements, and more frequent use of forceps, with all the inherent risks they brought. Even so, the method continued long enough for Queen Elizabeth II to use it for the birth of her first three children.
In 1931, the majority of women couldn’t afford such things. On the whole, poor women still gave birth at home and were cared for by midwives and handywomen. Pain-relieving drugs were not an option, except, perhaps, for the odd drop of laudanum. In 1947, a hundred years after Queen Victoria had her first whiff of chloroform, a doctor said, ‘We have the knowledge of how to relieve pain, we have excellent machines designed for this purpose, we lack only a genuine national desire to help.’ The women in Seventh Daughter had no access to chloroform or Twilight Sleep. All in all, this was probably a good thing.
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