Opium (6 page)

Thomas Dover was the inventor of another opium product, Dover's Powder, which first appeared in the
London Pharmacopoeia
of 1788 and was being used up until the Second World War.

Dover was a fascinating, larger-than-life character. As a young man he had lived in Sydenham's house in the village of Wyndford Eagle in Dorset, where he contracted smallpox. Sydenham treated and cured him. After studying under Sydenham, he became a privateer and commanded a vessel called the
Duke,
with which he raided the coast of South America: on 2 February 1709, he rescued Alexander Selkirk (on whom Defoe based Robinson Crusoe) from the Juan Fernández Islands. Dover later returned to England and set up in medical practice: although lacking any formal training other than that acquired with Sydenham, he had doubtless picked up a large amount of knowledge on his travels.

Dover's Powder was described by its inventor as a ‘diaphoretic' (a substance to promote sweating), for which he gave the method of preparation in his
Ancient Physician's Legacy to his Country,
a collection of writings from his forty-nine years in the medical profession. The ingredients were 1 ounce each of opium, liquorice and ipecacuanha with 4 ounces each of saltpetre and vitriolated tartar. Dover wrote the dosage was:

from 40 to 60 or 70 grains in a glass of white wine posset on going to bed. In two or three hours at the furthest the patient will be free from pain, and though not able to put his foot to the ground, ‘tis very much if he cannot walk next day.

He declared quite bluntly that the powder was strong, adding that ‘some apothecaries have desired their patients to make their wills before they venture upon so large a dose.'

Not only physicians and travellers were well acquainted with opium. So, too, were writers. In
The Canterbury Tales,
writing in
The Prologue
of the pilgrim who was a doctor, Chaucer lists, amongst others, Aesculapeius, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Galen, Avicenna and a number of Arabic doctors (such as Rhazes, Hali, Serapion and the Moor, Averroes) who were noted for their opium use. His catalogue is not restricted to Arabs and classical figures: Chaucer also mentions John of Gaddesden, a medical authority educated at Merton College, Oxford, who died in 1361, during Chaucer's lifetime. In
The Pardoner's Tale,
the third rioter plans the death of his comrades by poisoning their bottles of wine with, Chaucer adds, a substance described by Avicenna as sure to bring on a pretty ghastly end whilst the grieving Lady in
The Book of the Duchess
bemoans that even Galen and Hippocrates could not heal her woe or ease her pain.

It goes without saying opium did not escape William Shakespeare's attention. His most famous reference comes in a soliloquy by Iago in
Othello:

Not poppy, nor mandragore,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

Which thou ow'dst yesterday.

The imagery is not all that poetic. Shakespeare would have known the term ‘drowsy syrup' for, in fact, it was accepted medical terminology for opium.

Sir Thomas Browne, who was a seventeenth-century doctor as well as a writer, used opium as an image in his work: ‘The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, there is no antidote against the opium of time' and ‘I need no other laudanum than this [his faith in prayer] to make me sleep.' Robert Burton, the noted scholar and priest who died in 1640, wrote in his famous work,
Anatomy of Melancholy,
of the problem of those who were insomniacs ‘by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains [which] is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men.' His remedy was
laudanum Paracelsi,
swallowed with violets, roses, lettuce, mandrake, henbane, nutmegs or willows: the last was an interesting addition for it was known that willow also cured headaches, containing as it does a natural form of aspirin. Alternative cures for melancholia which Burton proposed included smelling a ball of opium (as he said the Turks did), anointing the forehead upon retiring with an opium–rosewater mixture and applying leeches behind the ears then rubbing opium into their puncture marks.

Whilst most scholars and writers would have been acquainted with opium, few would have been addicted. By taking it in small, infrequent quantities, they would have avoided the trap. Yet there was one who was famously habituated: he was Thomas Shadwell, the leading Whig supporter, Restoration dramatist and poet.

His habit was widely known throughout society and he became the butt of jokes as a result of it. Shadwell, who had a long-standing political and literary quarrel with John Dryden, was the subject of the latter's mock-heroic poem
MacFlecknoe,
the Prince of Dullness, who ‘never deviates into sense' and who was given a wreath of poppies. In his
Absalom and Achitophel,
Dryden directly refers to Shadwell's habit. Yet, whilst his addiction was ridiculed for the sake of literary enmity, Dryden did not condemn it and a mock epitaph On Shadwell's death more or less treated his habituation as an acceptable failing. It went:

Tom writ, his readers still slept o'er his book,

For Tom took opium, and they opiates took.

Ironically, Shadwell had the last laugh. After the revolution of 1688, he superseded Dryden as both Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal. Clearly, his addiction was not regarded as an obstacle to his rising in both royal favour and literary stature. His death was ironic, too: despite his funeral orator stating, to his certain knowledge, that Shadwell had not taken his dose of opium and went to his maker with a clear mind, it seems more than likely he died of an overdose.

In later years, opium was to claim more famous slaves or acolytes. Clive of India was addicted to it, having taken it as a painkiller for a bowel complaint: he killed himself at the age of forty-nine with an overdose. Robert Hall, the Baptist divine, was addicted, as was Thomas Wedgwood, the father of photography. The Duke of Wellington reported that George IV took laudanum to counteract his alcoholic hangovers. In America, Benjamin Franklin, the politician and one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, was almost certainly addicted to opium in his declining years, as was John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia, the arrogant and eccentric politician who fought the emancipation of slaves even though he gave his own their liberty in his will.

Inevitably, with such an extensive application of opium for a huge range of illnesses, addiction was common, yet it was hardly ever addressed and was generally accepted as the price one paid for the relief of pain. One reference to the hazard of addiction may be found in Purchas's volume,
Purchas His Pilgrimage,
published in 1613:

… they [travellers in Africa and Asia] suppose I know not what conjunction and efficacie both of Mars and Venus are therein; but being once used, must daily be continued on paine of death.

Dr John Jones's
Mysteries of Opium Reveal'd
published in 1700 – probably the earliest book specifically dealing with opium – mentioned the risk of addiction as well as the pleasures the drug offered. It did not specifically warn against opium, merely accepting addiction as a possible outcome of opium taking.

Jones, who as well as publishing, practising medicine and studying opium, invented a clock improbably driven by bellows, wrote that opium produced ‘a dull, mopish and heavy Disposition', caused a loss of memory and generally affected the whole body. He outlined both the physical and mental contra-indications of excessive usage or high dosage, also noting the effects of withdrawal. Almost certainly an addict himself, if Jones had not undergone withdrawal he had most certainly witnessed others going through its rigours, for he reported a sudden cessation of opium taking brought on ‘great, and even intolerable Distresses, Anxieties and Depressions of Spirits, which in a few days commonly end in a most miserable Death, attended with strange Agonies.'

Yet, despite such a warning, he also emphasised the pleasurable sides of opium use which he appears to have regarded as not only being a vehicle for pleasant fantasies, the dulling of pain and release from anxiety, but also for ‘Promptitude, Serenity, Alacrity and Expediteness in Dispatching and Managing Business … Assurance, Ovations of the Spirits, Courage, Contempt of Danger, and Magnanimity … Euphory, or easie undergoing of all Labour, Journeys … Satisfaction, Acquiescence, Contentation, Equanimity' and a good deal more. As a summary, he wrote ‘if [after taking opium] the person keeps himself in action, discourse of business, it seems … like a most delicious and extraordinary refreshment of the spirits upon very good news, or any other great cause of joy … It has been compared (not without good cause) to a permanent gentle degree of that pleasure which modesty forbids the name of…' The pleasure Jones's modesty forbade him to name might well be described as sex: addicts frequently comment on how orgasmic the sensation of opiates can seem. As for the illnesses Jones claimed opium would cure, his list covers almost every ailment from travel sickness to amputations, gout to bubonic plague and, most marvellous and ironic of all, he declared it was a cure for hypochondria.

Perhaps the most vulpine aspect of Jones's book was his claim that his was the truthful account of the ways and pitfalls of opium. Like any addict, he claimed miracles for the drug, insisting his book was written without prejudice or ‘any sly or sordid Evasion, or considerable Omission (which has been the perfidious Course of Authors in this case).' In truth, he merely told what he saw through the addict's eyes. His book was also criticised by a contemporary academic, with some justification, as being ‘extraordinary and perfectly unintelligible'.

Jones summarised his thoughts by concluding, ‘opium does not operate by causing a grievous sensation and there being no other way left by which it may operate it must operate by causing a pleasant sensation … What can then cure pain and all its effects better than pleasure?'

With the development of scientific curiosity, doctors and students began to wonder what it was about opium that made it work as it did yet opium lost little of its mystery. It was still referred to as ‘the Hand of God' or ‘the sacred anchor of life'.

Even Robert Boyle, author of
The Skeptical Chymist
and after whom the fundamental natural law is named, believed in opium's occult secret. He was convinced it affected the ‘animal spirits' and the nervous system. Dr John Freitag claimed its narcotic abilities were due to its extreme coldness, a concept dating back to the Middle Ages and the belief in humours. Monsieur Pomet, Chief Druggist to Louis XIV, explained opium's capabilities in a similar vein:

Opium procures rest by its viscous and sulphureous particles, which being convey'd to the channels of the brain, by the volatile parts, agglutinates and fixes the animal spirits, in such a manner that it stops for some time their circulation, from the swiftness of their former motion; so that during that obstruction, or tye upon the spirits, sleep ensues; for the senses are as it were fettered or locked up by the viscous or agglutinating property of opium.

One of opium's most avid students, Pomet referred to it as a ‘narcotick, hypnotick and anodyne'. It was good, amongst other things, for composing ‘the Hurry of the Spirits', promoting insensibility, useful in diseases of the breasts and lungs, prevented the spitting of blood, cured coughs and colds, vomiting and looseness of the bowels, as well as being handy in the treatment of ‘cholick, pleurisis and hysterick cases'. His study of opium went so far as to chronicle its sources and types. He wrote:

First, the pure from Cairo or Thebes. Secondly, the black and hard from Aden. Thirdly, the yellow and softer sort from Cambaia and Decam in the East Indies. Yet we generally at this time reckon but two sorts, being first the Turkish or Theban, which is weighty, of good consistency, thick and more solid than the Indian; of a lively fresh reddish colour, almost likes fresh aloes, of a strong poppy scent, of an acrid bitter taste, that will burn and flame; soft, easy to cut, and be dissolved in either water, wine or spirit of wine, and is pretty clean from dirt, excrements and filth. Secondly: the Indian opium, which is softer, yellower, lighter, not of so good a body, and much fouler, being in every respect inferior to the former.

Attitudes towards opium persisted broadly unchanged through the eighteenth century although occult considerations were abandoned as scientific study increased. Medical writers began to assess opium, investigate and even criticise it. In his
Family Herbal,
the eighteenth-century physician Dr John Hill recommended caution and expressed his doubt about its alleged ability to cure a mad dog's bite. George Young, in his
Treatise on Opium
published in the 1750s, and Dr Samuel Crumpe, in his
Inquiry into the Nature and Properties of Opium
in 1793, indicated the main features of addiction and touched upon the problems of withdrawal, but neither showed any sense of moral condemnation for either medicinal or recreational use. Crumpe went so far as to admit he had taken opium frequently and experienced its euphoria: there was no suggestion he took it to treat an ailment.

Even the great Dr Samuel Johnson took opium on occasion, if only for medicinal purposes. Father of the English language, compiler of the first English dictionary, sage, seer and compendium of knowledge – or so his biographer, James Boswell, would have it – he was never addicted but took it to cure headaches and stomach trouble. Johnson, it seems, was wise to the dangers and wily enough to avoid them. In
Boswell's Life of Johnson,
the biographer recorded:

On Sunday, March 23 [1783], I breakfasted with Dr Johnson, who seemed much relieved, having taken opium the night before. He however protested against it, as a remedy that should be given with the utmost reluctance, and only in extreme necessity. I mentioned how commonly it was used in Turkey, and that therefore it could not be so pernicious as he apprehended. He grew warm and said, ‘Turks take opium, and Christians take opium; but Russell, in his Account of Aleppo, tells us, that it is as disgraceful in Turkey to take too much opium, as it is with us to get drunk. Sir, it is amazing how things are exaggerated.'