by Lydia Kang
Red Nitre
For thousands of years, when children could not be produced, the blame has been placed upon women. It didn’t help that the biology of human procreation was a mystery for much of this time. For infertility, Hippocrates recommended, “When the cervix is closed too tightly the inner orifice must be opened using a special mixture composed of red nitre, cumin, resin, and honey.”
And just what was this red nitre? It might have been potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, which is used for pickling corned beef and making fireworks. Or it could have been soda ash, or natron—what Egyptians used to dry out their mummies. Either way, it was supposed to irritate that cervix into opening wide up. Pickling, fireworks, and mummies… . Hmm. Not exactly the most pleasant things you’d want to associate with baby-making.
Garlic Cloves and Anise
According to Hippocrates, other indications of fertility assumed there was an internal freeway communicating between the mouth and the vagina. So, if you rubbed a garlic clove near her nether regions and smelled garlic breath, a woman was obviously fertile. Another fragrant variation included having her drink anise in water; if her belly button itched the next day, she was a baby-making machine raring to go.
Animal Remedies for Childbirth
For a successful childbirth, first-century scholar Pliny the Elder recommended putting the right foot of a hyena on the pregnant woman to help with the delivery. (The left foot would cause death. Who knew “lethal hyena left feet” was in the poisoner’s armamentarium?) He also advised drinking powdered sow’s dung for labor pains. Maybe the smell helped distract the mother-to-be?
Other Pliny pregnancy pairings: Drinking goose semen (okay—how on earth do they ask the male goose to … or maybe they just kill the goose and fish out the testicles … never mind) or drinking liquids that flowed from a weasel’s uterus through its genitals. Yum. How about Pliny’s recommendation to use a dog’s placenta as a catcher’s mitt to pull out the infant being born? Any takers?
Bird Poop Potion
The Trotula is a group of medical texts named after one of its writers, Trota of Salerno, a female physician author who lived in twelfth-century Italy. Before you start celebrating this win for women’s rights, read on. She wrote, “If therefore the menses are deficient and a woman’s body is emaciated, bleed her from the vein under the arch of the inside of the foot.” To help out a woman giving birth, a potion made from the white stuff found in hawk poop is supposedly useful. Imagine seeing that one written on a prescription pad.
Weasel Nuts
The Trotula also gives contraceptive advice: “Take a male weasel and let its testicles be removed and let it be released alive. Let the woman carry these testicles with her in her bosom and let her tie them in goose skin … and she will not conceive.” Well. If ever there was a deterrent to sex, it’s undressing a woman and finding a pair of weasel nuts shoved betwixt her cleavage. At least it’s a good weasel contraceptive. Ah, that poor nutless weasel.
A possible illustration of Trota of Salerno.
Plants & Soil
Nature’s Gifts
6
Opiates
Of Poppy-Crowned Gods, the Stone of Immortality, Heroin the Hero, and Morphine the Babysitter
Crying infants are not easy on the ears. Especially if you’re an overworked baby-minder a century or so ago caring for ten children, whose mothers were working in the local factory. Or you’re an older child with little siblings to watch. Or you’re an exhausted mother who can’t deal with another sleepless night, perhaps with another baby on the way. Sure, those cries are a message that they might be hungry or covered in poop. Maybe it’s colic or teething pain. But for crying out loud, the noise. One pair of hands can only do so much.
Ah, a mother’s bliss of realizing she can finally knock out her kids and get some sleep.
So you might reach for Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Godfrey’s Cordial, Jayne’s Carminative Balsam, or Daffy’s Elixir, all containing morphine or opium and all putting that baby right to sleep … or killing it.
You might think this is horrible, but drugging noisy infants was standard practice for several millennia. The Ebers Papyrus (1550 bce) describes using poppy plants mixed with wasp droppings to soothe a crying child. Seventh-century physician and philosopher Avicenna recommended a poppy, fennel, and anise seed potion. From the 1400s until this past century, textbooks recommended varying concoctions with opium and morphine for both sleeplessness and teething. If the baby didn’t want to be weaned? Founding father Alexander Hamilton had something to say about it. He recommended “a little weak white-wine whey, diluted brandy punch, or even a tea-spoonful or two of syrup of poppy … to prevent restlessness and fits of crying, till the breast is forgotten.”
The problem was everywhere. In Edinburgh in the late 1800s, Charles Routh noted that wet nurses were prone to drugging their charges, or themselves. “Either the nurse herself is a dram drinker or opium eater and so far affects the milk by the pernicious habit … or, secondly, she drugs the child.” The babies slept, sure, but that also meant they didn’t eat often, and any illnesses they did have were doped into silence.
Opium, the poor child’s nurse.
The Sweet Lull(aby) of Opium
So these babysitters weren’t winning any childcare awards. Still, they were taking part in the ancient tradition of utilizing the many properties of opium. Within half an hour of consuming it, you feel euphoric and drowsy, while even your most excruciating pain is numbed away. Sounds wonderful, right? Just wait for the side effects: itchy skin, constipation, nausea, and dangerously slow breathing. Oh, also crippling addiction. And death.
The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum (Greek for “poppy” and Latin for “sleep inducing”), has been known to man for more than five thousand years. The flower is a paperish wisp of white, red, pink, or purple, with petals that hardly last two days before withering away on the wind. But don’t be fooled by its delicacy: The poppy’s power isn’t in its flowering beauty, but in the stiff narcotic-laden pod it leaves behind. In 3400 bce, the Sumerians called it Hul Gil, or the “joy plant.” Two thousand years later, opium use had spread through North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Mixed with licorice or balsam, it was said to cure everything. In ancient Egypt, the goddess Isis was rumored to have given opium to the god Ra for his headaches. Because even gods get headaches, right?
In ancient Greece, the divinities were often portrayed with poppies in hand or wreathed as crowns. Opium was associated with a host of gods who offered various forms of sweet relief: Nyx (night), Hypnos (sleep), Thanatos (death), and Morpheus (dreams). In the fourth century bce, Hippocrates held an appropriate regard for its dangers and recommended it be used sparingly to sleep, to stop bleeding or pain, and for women’s diseases. Homer wrote of a drug that was likely based on opium, called nepenthe, which was given to Telemachus by Helen to induce forgetfulness. Hemlock and opium were used in a lethal combination to kill the condemned. Opium was rather useful. But it was misused, all too often.
Opium poppy and pods, including cross-section showing laticifer full of opiates.
Galen, in the second century ce, loved opium as a medicinal a little too much. He thought it would cure vertigo, deafness, epilepsy, strokes, bad vision, kidney stones, leprosy, and oh, pretty much everything. After all, it certainly made people feel better. In the seventh century, Avicenna wrote a thesis on opium expounding its benefits. His writings in his Canon of Medicine made perfect sense—it can help with painful gout, slow diarrhea, and put insomniacs to sleep. In the latter sense, opium is one of the oldest known hypnotics in the world. He even thought it helped those with out-of-control libidos: “Patients with disturbingly high libido can use opioids topically.” Uh, okay.
Avicenna warned his readers about the symptoms of opium toxicity he had observed—difficulty breathing, itching, and unconsciousness. It’s easy to imagine, without regulation of dosing or production, that overdoses weren’t uncommon, hence Avicenna’s wor
ds of caution. But in an ironic turn, he succumbed to what was likely the first documented opium overdose in history. Apparently, he was suffering from colic and his servant overdosed his medicine in an effort to steal from him. Oh, he was also having a little too much sex at the time (so much for the lower-libido theory). He died shortly thereafter. (Note to self: Colic plus excessive sex and opium can kill you. Perhaps there are worse ways to die.)
Opium Gets an Upgrade: Laudanum
You can thank Paracelsus for opium’s explosion in fifteenth-century Europe. The celebrity physician called opium the stone of immortality and is credited with inventing laudanum, which he humbly declared “superior to all other heroic remedies.” One of his contemporaries, Johannes Oporinus, said, “He had pills which he called laudanum which looked like pieces of mouse shit… . He boasted he could, with these pills, wake up the dead.”
Paracelsus, inventor of laudanum.
Paracelsus’s mouse-poop laudanum (from the Latin, laudare: “to praise”) was supposedly concocted of 25 percent opium, plus mummy (you read that correctly: see Cannibalism & Corpse Medicine, page 221), bezoar stone taken from a cow’s digestive tract, henbane (a sedative and hallucinogenic plant), amber, crushed coral and pearls, musk, oils, the bone from the heart of a stag (what?), and unicorn horn (more likely, rhinoceros or narwhal). Some of his recipes included frog spawn; others called for orange juice, cinnamon, cloves, ambergris, and saffron. Basically, it was mostly opium mixed with a lot of expensive crap that smelled (mostly) awesome. Not a huge improvement on the status quo. Could it wake the dead? Er, no.
In the 1600s, Thomas Sydenham popularized his own take on laudanum, without the frills and furbelows of Paracelsus’s version but with one key addition: lots of alcohol. He included tasty additions of cinnamon and cloves, too. It was touted as a treatment for the plague. Sadly, laudanum didn’t cure the plague. But it probably made victims feel a lot better while the disease mercilessly killed them. Not that Sydenham would know—he fled London to avoid the plague like … uh, the plague.
Meanwhile, opium became a huge commodity across the world. Two opium wars were fought in the nineteenth century. The issues of Chinese sovereignty, addiction, and trade deals swirled in a power play that resulted in the loss of Hong Kong to the United Kingdom for more than 150 years. Opium dens where one could smoke solid opium opened internationally, often supplied through the Chinese opium trade.’
An opium smoker’s tools.
But it was laudanum, the liquid version, that took a larger toll in the West. Even though they weren’t as potent as straight opium, these derivative medicines packed a punch and tasted better, too. The addition of alcohol only intensified the euphoric and mind-altering effects. The products were touted by most physicians and obtainable without a prescription, used in the comfort of the home—no opium den required. It was much easier to dose up or down, or up, up, up, as could often be the case.
Laudanum—with the warning “not to be taken,” which is all sorts of confusing.
Inevitably, such an easily affordable medicine brought the dark shadow of addiction along for the ride. It was a soporific that temporarily banished all that was difficult in every class of society. In the 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, author Thomas De Quincey waxed poetic on his addiction to laudanum. “Here was a panacea … for all human woes … happiness may now be bought for a penny.” And then there was the bad: “I seemed every night to descend … into chasms and sunless abysses … amounting at last to utter darkness, as of some suicidal despondency.”
Ad for balsam containing cherry bark, alcohol, and opiates (c. 1840). For “all lung diseases” and playtime, apparently.
Addiction was no joke, and yet druggists sold gallons of laudanum, opium elixirs, and narcotic nostrums. Take Dover’s Powder, an eighteenth-century remedy containing opium, ipecac, licorice, saltpeter (potassium nitrate, great for explosives and pickling pork), and vitriolic tartar (potassium sulfate, a fertilizer). While treating colds and fevers, Dover’s Powder could put people to sleep … permanently. Of the effective dose—seventy grains—creator Thomas Dover said, “Some apothecaries have desired their patients to make their wills before they venture upon so large a dose.”
Well, sign us up!
Morphine: Dream or Nightmare?
Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner was a mere twenty-one years old when he successfully extracted morphine from the gums and waxes inside the poppy pod. It was 1806. He wasn’t even trained in chemistry, only apprenticed to a pharmacist since he was sixteen. His equipment was crude, but he persevered. He called his newly discovered compound principium somniferum for the sleep-making principle within opium. And then he named it after the Greek god of dreams—Morpheus.
Say hi to morphine. Of course, Sertürner had to test it. Previously, with his less pure extracts, he’d try them on random dogs and a mouse that had wandered into his lab. This time, he treated himself (ethicists, look away) as well as some teenage boys (IRBs, also look away). He reported, “The outcome with the three young men was decidedly rapid and extreme. It presented as … exhaustion, and severe narcosis that came close to fainting… . I fell into a dream-like state.” Fearful of their degree of intoxication, he had them all drink vinegar to vomit it all up. Some kept vomiting and the intoxicated sensation lasted for days.
Still, he made his point. The extract was indeed what made opium so alluring (and nauseating). And because society is always ready for something stronger and purer, morphine was soon widely available. Sir William Osler, one of the founding fathers of modern medicine, called morphine “God’s own medicine.” There we go again with gods and their headaches. Though more likely, he meant a creation for man that was unlike any other.
In the nineteenth century, bleeding, purging, leeching, and enemas were still all the rage, but in morphine doctors found something much gentler. Together with opium, it would occupy materia medica texts forever after, recommended for obvious ailments like pain and diarrhea. (Cholera and dysentery killed far fewer people, thanks to opium.) But the medicines were also thrown at anything that ailed people. Snake bites, rabies, tetanus, ulcers, diabetes, poisoning, and depression and other mental illnesses were “cured.” Doctors and their patients had found a very comfortable medicine in morphine.
Huge amounts of opium and morphine were used during the Civil War, where they helped with dysentery and terrible battlefield wounds, but also created addicts (so many, that opiate addiction was dubbed soldier’s disease or army disease at the time). While still mounted on his horse, Union surgeon Major Nathan Mayer would pour morphine doses into his gloved hand and let soldiers lick it off.
And in the 1850s, just when we thought opium had reached its most potent, accessible form, Alexander Wood invented the modern hypodermic syringe. Injected morphine was stronger and required a far smaller dose. As a result, use became even more widespread, especially in the middle and upper classes because morphine, syringes, and needle kits were expensive.
By the 1880s, Wood’s invention brought on new creations: morphinomania and morphinism, terms for morphine addiction. The syringe was a miracle for medicine, but unfortunately a vehicle for a dark disease.
Heroin, the Hero?
If opium was a euphoric, painkilling gift to humanity, then surely morphine was even better—a godsend. But opium and morphine were creating addicts. So naturally, humankind wasn’t satisfied. Our instinct to tinker with nature and look for the next best/horrific thing couldn’t be suppressed. Somewhere between the invention of the rocket (thirteenth century) and email (1971), we invented the monster that is heroin.
In 1874 London, a pharmacist named Charles Romley Alder Wright was searching to create a version of morphine without the addictive qualities. His new opiate, diacetylmorphine, was shockingly potent, but it took another decade before a German chemist working for Bayer Laboratories, Heinrich Dreser, would look to this drug as the winning racehorse that would be Bayer’s money-maker.
Anot
her Bayer chemist, Felix Hoffmann, had just “reinvented” aspirin. But Dreser didn’t think aspirin would be profitable. It would be “enfeebling” to the heart, he thought. (Everyone out there with coronary artery disease taking aspirin—please ignore that.) So he had Hoffmann whip up some diacetylmorphine instead, knowing it had already been synthesized. He tested it on rabbits and frogs, and then thoughtfully tried it on employees at Bayer. They loved it. Some said it made them feel mighty, or heroisch (“heroic,” German).
They called it heroin. Surely, heroin would be nonaddictive. Surely, this was the new pain reliever everyone was looking for to replace opium. (Never mind that aspirin was, and still is, a great pain reliever.) They even thought it had fewer side effects. And it was potent; almost eight times more so than morphine, which means that smaller amounts could be used. And the kicker?
Bayer touted heroin as a cure for morphine addiction.
By 1899, the company was synthesizing a ton of heroin annually, in the form of pills, powders, elixirs, and sweetened lozenges that were sold internationally. Bayer claimed it could treat tuberculosis, asthma, colds, and coughs from all causes. Ads featured effervescent claims: “Heroin clears the complexion, gives buoyance to the mind, regulates the stomach and the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health.” Many doctors drank the veritable Kool-aid about heroin being nonaddictive. The Boston Medical Journal wrote in 1900, “It possesses many advantages over morphine… . It is not a hypnotic,” and luckily, there was “an absence of danger of acquiring the habit.” But reality reared its ugly head, and early in the twentieth century, more and more medical journals reported on heroin’s dark, addictive side.
Bayer, a company many don’t realize marketed heroin.
Opiates’ Downfall and Persistence
Abuse of opium continued into the twentieth century, until the international community decided to finally put their foot down. In 1912, the Hague International Opium Convention promised to usher in an era of drug control. Bayer stopped production of heroin in 1913. The United States followed with its own Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, which regulated the import, sale, and distribution of opiate and coca products.
