GODFREY'S CORDIAL. (DRUGGED TO DEATH)

[Stanley]

Experts believe mothers are buying mixtures such as Godfrey's Cordial, and James's fever powders, without knowing that many patent medicines contain killer chemicals.

Highly poisonous metals like mercury and antimony are listed among the ingredients of many cure-alls, a doctor said.

*A Leicester-based missionary, Joseph Dare, voiced his concern about the number of infant deaths in the city in the early and middle years of the Queen's reign.

Mr Dare said a local GP blamed disease, overcrowding, lack of food, sanitation and early marriages for the high death rate.

Babies were fed from dirty bottles with a mixture of bread and boiled water, he said. Their carers, old men, women or children, then gave the babies drugs to keep them quiet until their mothers returned from work.

A chemist said it was "common practice" for mothers to give Godfrey's Cordial or laudanum, another kind of opium, to babies to "keep them quiet while the mother is at work.

"It is not unknown for mothers to begin this practice with infants of a fortnight old commencing with half a teaspoon of Godfrey's or one or two drops of laudanum."

Many babies died, he claimed, without any inquiry or inquest being held into their deaths. In one family four children had met their deaths through taking infant cordial.

The following report appeared in the Lincolnshire Times on January 8, 1856.

On Thursday morning Mr Coroner Hitchins held an inquest on the body of Thomas Porter, a child aged 15 months. The deceased had been well up to the night of its death when about 12 o'clock it was convulsed but recovered and went to sleep and at about 5 o'clock it was dead.

Every effort was made to conceal the fact of occasionally administering laudanum, but it was at length admitted. The mother of the deceased, a widow lodged with a woman of the name of Fynes, showed strong evidence of the effects of opium taking - sunken eyes, emaciated cheeks and an enfeebled frame.

After a due caution had been given to the mother of the deceased against contracting a habit and indulgence in opium, which had produced so much evil, the jury returned a verdict that the death of the deceased was sudden but whether from an opiate injudiciously given the evidence was not satisfactory.

*The following appeared in the Nottingham Journal on December 20, 1845.

Inquest into the death of Mira Newton, 17 weeks, revealed that the child had been habituated since birth to the "infants mixture to keep it quiet".

The dose proved too strong and brought on a convulsion which led to her death.

Verdict: natural death, accelerated by an overdose of a certain narcotic called Infants Mixture, or Godfrey's Cordial, administered by the mother, she being ignorant of its effects.

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Nineteenth-Century Opium In Britain
The nineteenth-century use of opiates was more or less the same in Britain. A classic report on the English industrial system, The Factory System Illustrated (1842), by W. Dodd, noted that factory workers of the time used opiates-notably laudanum-to quiet crying babies.
In the official Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council for 1864 it was observed: To push the sale of opiate ... is the great aim of some enterprising wholesale merchants. By druggists it is considered the leading article.18 The report also noted the giving of opiates to infants; 19 Karl Marx, citing this report in Capital (1867), spoke of the English working-class custom of dosing children with opiates . 20 In 1873 an English physician reported:
Amongst the three millions and three-quarters [people in London] there are to be found some persons here and there who take [opium] as a luxury, though by far the greater number of those who take it in anything like quantity do so for some old neuralgia or rheumatic malady, and began under medical advice. Neither is it to be found over the agricultural or manufacturing districts, save in the most scattered and casual way. The genuine opium-eating districts are the ague and fen districts of Norfolk and Lincolnshire. There it is not casual, accidental, or rare, but popular, habitual, and common. Anyone who visits such a town as Louth or Wisbeach, and strolls about the streets on a Saturday evening, watching the country people as they do their marketing, may soon satisfy himself that the crowds in the chemists' shops come for opium; and they have a peculiar way of getting it. They go in, lay down their money, and receive the opium pills in exchange without saving a word. For instance, I was at Wisbeach one evening in August 1871; went into a chemist's shop; laid a penny on the counter. The chemist said - "The best?" I nodded. He gave me a pill box and took up the penny; and so the purchase was completed without my having uttered a syllable. You offer money, and get opium as a matter of course. This may show how familiar the custom is.
In these districts it is taken by people of all classes, but especially by the poor and miserable, and by those who in other districts would seek comfort from gin or beer.
Godfrey's Cordial-a mixture of opium, molasses for sweetening, and sassafras for flavoring-was especially popular in England. Dr. C. Fraser Brockington reports that in mid-nineteenth-century Coventry, ten gallons of Godfrey's Cordial enough for 12,000 doses-was sold weekly, and was administered to 3,000 infants under two years of age.
Even greater quantities of opium mixtures were said to be sold in Nottingham.... Every surgeon in Marshland testified to the fact that there was not a labourer's house in which the bottle of opium was not to be seen, and not a child, but who got it in some form. . . . Wholesale druggists reported the sale of immense quantities of opium; a retail druggist dispensed up to 200 pounds a year-in pills and penny sticks or as Godfrey's Cordial.... To some extent this was a practice which had been taken on during the years when malaria was indigenous in the Fens and when, a century before, the poppy had been cultivated for the London market.

Nineteenth-Century Nonmedicinal Use Of Opium
The nonmedicinal use of opiates, while legal in both the United States and England, was not considered respectable. Indeed, as an anonymous but perceptive and well-informed American writer noted in the Catholic World for September 1881, it was as disreputable as drinking alcoholic beverages-and much harder to detect.
The gentleman who would not be seen in a bar-room, however respectable, or who would not purchase liquor and use it at home, lest the odor might be detected upon his person, procures his supply of morphia and has it in his pocket ready for instantaneous use. It is odorless and occupies but little space. . . . He zealously guards his secret from his nearest friend-for popular wisdom has branded as a disgrace that which he regards as a misfortune.
Opiate use was also frowned upon in some circles as immoral-a vice akin to dancing, smoking, theater-going, gambling, or sexual promiscuity. But while deemed immoral, it is important to note that opiate use in the nineteenth century was not subject to the moral sanctions current today. Employees were not fired for addiction. Wives did not divorce their addicted husbands, or husbands their addicted wives. Children were not taken from their homes and lodged in foster homes or institutions because one or both parents were addicted. Addicts continued to participate fully in the life of the community. Addicted children and young people continued to go to school, Sunday School, and college. Thus, the nineteenth century avoided one of the most disastrous effects of current narcotics laws and attitudes-the rise of a deviant addict subculture, cut off from respectable society and without a road back to respectability.
Our nineteenth-century forbears correctly perceived the major objection to the opiates. They are addicting. Though the word addiction was seldom used during the nineteenth century, the phenomenon was well understood. The true nature of the narcotic evil becomes visible, the Catholic World article pointed out, when someone who has been using an opiate for some time attempts to give up its use. Suddenly his eyes are opened to his folly and he realizes the startling fact that he is in the toils of a serpent as merciless as the boa-constrictor and as relentless as fate. With a firm determination to free himself he discontinues its use. Now his sufferings begin and steadily increase until they become unbearable. The tortures of Dives are his; but unlike that miser, he has only to stretch forth his hand to find oceans with which to satisfy his thirst. That human nature is not often equal to so extraordinary a self-denial affords little cause for astonishment. . . . Again and again he essays release from a bondage so humiliating, but meets with failure only, and at last submits to his fate a confirmed opium-eater.
Our nineteenth-century forbears also perceived opiate use as a will-weakening vice-for surely, they insisted, a man or woman of strong will could stop if he tried hard enough. The fact was generally known that addicts deprived of their opiates (when hospitalized for some illness unrelated to their addiction, for example) would lie or even steal to get their drug, and addicts cured of their addiction repeatedly relapsed. Hence there was much talk of the moral degeneration caused by the opiates.
Nevertheless, there was very little popular support for a law banning these substances. Powerful organizations for the suppression of alcoholic stimulants exist throughout the land. An 1881 article in the Catholic World noted, but there were no similar anti-opiate organizations.
The reason for this lack of demand for opiate prohibition was quite simple: the drugs were not a menace to society
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 A significant advance in opium-processing occurred in the sixteenth century. In freebase form, the alkaloids found in opium are significantly less soluble in water than in alcohol. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1490-1541), better known as Paracelsus, claimed: "I possess a secret remedy which I call laudanum and which is superior to all other heroic remedies". He concocted laudanum [literally: "something to be praised"] by extracting opium into brandy, thus producing, in effect, tincture of morphine. His original witches' brew contained extra ingredients such as crushed pearls, henbane and frog-spawn. It was steeped in alchemical mumbo-jumbo: Paracelsus called opium itself "the stone of immortality". Thomas Sydenham, however, went on to standardise laudanum in the now classic formulation: 2 ounces of opium; 1 ounce of saffron; a drachm of cinnamon and cloves - all dissolved in a pint of Canary wine.
        Laudanum can be habit-forming. Yet the sometimes spectacular ill-effects noted by early modern writers when coming off laudanum probably owed more to its ethyl alcohol content than its opium. As their opioid tolerance increased, so did users' consumption of tinctures: De Quincey's florid withdrawal signs on abstaining suggest an alcoholic's delirium tremens rather than a junky's cold-turkey.
        By the nineteenth century, vials of laudanum and raw opium were freely available at any English pharmacy or grocery store. One nineteenth-century author declared: "[Laudanum] Drops, you are darling! If I love nothing else, I love you." Another user, the English gentleman quoted in Jim Hogshire's Opium for the Masses (1994), enthused that opium felt akin to a gentle and constant orgasm.
        British opium imports rose from a brisk 91,000lb in 1830 to an astonishing 280,000lb in 1860. Despite British control of Indian production, most domestic imports came from Turkey. This was because of the superior morphine content - 10-13% - of Turkish opium; opium's varying potency depends on its particular growing conditions. For obscure reasons, opium was most popular among the rural peasantry of the Fens. The British Medical Association estimated that sparsely populated Cambridgeshire and its environs consumed around half of Britain's annual opium imports. This consumption was topped up by generous use of poppy-tea brewed from homegrown poppies.
        Youngsters were introduced to the pleasures of opiates at their mothers' breast. Harassed baby-minders - and overworked parents - found opium-based preparations were a dependable way to keep their kids happy and docile; this was an era before Ritalin. Sales of Godfrey's Cordial, a soothing syrup of opium tincture effective against colic, were prodigious. But Godfrey's Cordial had its competitors: Street's Infants' Quietness, Atkinson's Infants' Preservative, and Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup.
        Opium was viewed as a medicine, not a drug of abuse. Contemporary medical theory didn't allow that one could become addicted to a cure. However, the chemists and physicians most actively investigating the properties of opium were also its dedicated consumers; and this may conceivably have coloured their judgement.
        Writers of distinction certainly consumed opium in copious quantities. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote Kubla Khan in a dream-like trance while under its spell; opium promotes vivid dreams and rich visual imagery as well as gentle euphoria...
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Down to a sunless sea
...
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome, those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
Fellow English author Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) writes of "the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for pain". De Quincey seems to have treated opium as a mood-brightening smart-drug. The author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) draws invidious comparisons with alcohol. He attributes a heightening of his mental powers to opium use...
"Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation and harmony. Wine robs a man of self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it....Wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance; and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilize and disperse the intellectual energies; whereas opium seems to compose what has been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. ...A man who is inebriated...is often...brutal; but the opium eater...feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of majestic intellect...."
        De Quincey states that not he himself, but opium, should be regarded as the true hero of his essay. Opium was his "Divine Poppy-juice, as indispensable as breathing". By reputation, opium users have dull wits, idle lives and diminished sensibility. This was not de Quincey's verdict. He made a habit of going to the opera under its influence - and found his experience of music delightfully enhanced...
"Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind, generally increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure...It is sufficient to say, that a chorus, etc of elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life - not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents removed...and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed..."
Opium induces gentle, subtle, dream-like hallucinations very different from the fierce and unpredictable weirdness of LSD. Baudelaire (1821-67) likens opium to a woman friend, "...an old and terrible friend, and, alas! like them all, full of caresses and deceptions." Across the Atlantic, in 1842, William Blair describes his experiences with opium in a New York magazine...
"While I was sitting at tea, I felt a strange sensation, totally unlike any thing I had ever felt before; a gradual creeping thrill, which in a few minutes occupied every part of my body, lulling to sleep the before-mentioned racking pain, producing a pleasing glow from head to foot, and inducing a sensation of dreamy exhilaration (if the phrase be intelligible to others as it is to me) similar in nature but not in degree to the drowsiness caused by wine, though not inclining me to sleep; in fact far from it, that I longed to engage in some active exercise; to sing, dance, or leap...so vividly did I feel my vitality - for in this state of delicious exhilaration even mere excitement seemed absolute elysium - that I could not resist the tendency to break out in the strangest vagaries, until my companions thought me deranged...After I had been seated [at the play I was attending] a few minutes, the nature of the excitement changed, and a 'waking sleep' succeeded. The actors on the stage vanished; the stage itself lost its reality; and before my entranced sight magnificent halls stretched out in endless succession with galley above gallery, while the roof was blazing with gems, like stars whose rays alone illumined the whole building, which was tinged with strange, gigantic figures, like the wild possessors of lost globe...I will not attempt farther to describe the magnificent vision which a little pill of 'brown gum' had conjured up from the realm of ideal being. No words that I can command would do justice to its Titanian splendour and immensity..."
       Until the nineteenth century, the only opioids used medicinally or recreationally took the form of crude opium. Opium is a complex chemical cocktail containing sugars, proteins, fats, water, meconic acid, plant wax, latex, gums, ammonia, sulphuric and lactic acids, and numerous alkaloids, most notably morphine (10%-15%), codeine (1%-3%), noscapine (4%-8%), papaverine (1%-3%), and thebaine (1%-2%). All of the latter, apart from thebaine, are used medicinally as analgesics. The opioid analgesics are of inestimable value because they reduce or abolish pain without causing a loss of consciousness. They also relieve coughs, spasms, fevers and diarrhea.
        Even thebaine, though without analgesic effect, is of immense pharmaceutical worth. This is because it can be used to produce semi-synthetic opioid morphine analogues such as oxycodone (Percodan), dihydromorphenone (Dilaudid), hydrocodone (Vicodin) and etorphine (Immobilon). Classes of morphine analogue include the diphenylpropylamines (e.g. methadone), the 4-phenylpiperidines (e.g. meperidine), the morphinans (e.g. levorphanol) and 6,7-benzomorphans (e.g. metazocine). Although seemingly structurally diverse, all these compounds either possess a piperidine ring or contain the critical part of its ring structure. Etorphine, for instance, is a very potent analogue of morphine. On one occasion a team of researchers, working in the 1960s under Professor Bentley of Macfarlan Smith and Co, drank mid-morning tea that had been stirred with a contaminated rod. They were soon laid out. The scientists had unwittingly drunk a drug later developed as etorphine. Etorphine is over 1000 times more powerful than morphine; it is used in dart-guns as Immobilon to subdue elephants and rhinos. Fortunately the scientists recovered.
        Morphine was first isolated from opium in 1805 by a German pharmacist, Wilhelm Sertürner. Sertürner described it as the Principium Somniferum. He named it morphium - after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. Today morphine is isolated from opium in substantially larger quantities - over 1000 tons per year - although most commercial opium is converted into codeine by methylation. On the illicit market, opium gum is filtered into morphine base and then synthesized into heroin.
        Doctors had long hunted for effective ways to administer drugs without ingesting them. Taken orally, opium is liable to cause unpleasant gastric side-effects. The development of the hypodermic syringe in the mid-nineteenth century allowed the injection of pure morphine. Both in Europe and America, members of high society and middle-class professionals alike would jack up daily; poor folk couldn't afford to inject drugs. Morphinism became rampant in the USA after its extensive use by injured soldiers on both sides of the Civil War. In late nineteenth-century America, opiates were cheap, legal and abundant. In the judgement of one historian, America became "a dope fiend's paradise". Moreover it was believed that injecting morphine wasn't addictive. Quitting habitual opium use can cause malaise, flu-like symptoms, and depression; morphine seemed an excellent cure. In China, for instance, early twentieth century missionaries handed out anti-opium remedies in such profusion that the pills became known as "Jesus Opium"; their active ingredient was morphine.
         Soldiers, missionaries and patent-medicine salesmen were not alone in eulogising its properties. A leading American medical textbook (1868) revealed that opiates...
"...cause a feeling of delicious ease and comfort, with an elevation of the whole moral and intellectual nature...There is not the same uncontrollable excitement as from alcohol, but an exaltation of our better mental qualities, a warmer glow of benevolence, a disposition to do great things, but nobly and beneficently, a higher devotional spirit, and withal a stronger self-reliance, and consciousness of power. Nor is this consciousness altogether mistaken. For the intellectual and imaginative faculties are raised to the highest point compatible with individual capacity...Opium seems to make the individual, for a time, a better and greater man...."
        Early optimism about morphine's non-addictive nature proved sadly misplaced. Women in particular came to be seen as especially vulnerable to opiate dependence. The most likely candidate for addiction, according to American doctor R Batholow, was...
"...a delicate female, having light blue eyes and flaxen hair, [who] possesses, according to my observations, the maximum susceptibility..."
Racist stereotypes, rampant xenophobia and lurid images of white slave-traders abounded too. In the 1850s and 1860s, tens of thousands of Chinese had emigrated to the USA to help build the western railroads and work the California mines. Opium-smoking was an integral part of Chinese culture; and its effects offered a merciful relief from dirty and backbreaking work. But the medical tide was turning. Dr Hamilton Wright, newly appointed US opium commissioner, blamed "the Chinese vice" for corrupting the nation's youth....
"One of the most unfortunate phases of the habit of smoking opium in this country [was] the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabiting with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities..."
Meanwhile Dr John Witherspoon, later President of the American Medical Association, exhorted the medical community to...
"...save our people from the clutches of this hydra-headed monster which stalks abroad through the civilized world, wrecking lives and happy homes, filling our jails and lunatic asylums, and taking from these unfortunates, the precious promise of eternal life..."
        So the search began for a powerful non-addictive alternative to opium and morphine. In 1874, English pharmacist C.R. Alder Wright had boiled morphine and acetic acid to produce diacetylmorphine, C17H17NO (C2H3O2)2. Diacetylmorphine was synthesized and marketed commercially by the German pharmaceutical giant, Bayer. In 1898, Bayer launched the best-selling drug-brand of all time, Heroin.

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"In Britain's early eighteenth century... the various names given to
opium solutions designed for household use:

Mother's Helper
Infant's Quietness
Atkinson's Preservative
Dalby's Carminative
Soothing Syrup
Godfrey's Cordial
James’ Fever mixture

And various corruptions of the above names. As one might surmise,
these concoctions of opium were expressly designed for the purpose of
quieting unruly children. The England of the Industrial Revolution was
not a particularly pleasant place to live and work in, especially for
the lower classes. Eighteen-hour workdays were not uncommon.
Contraception was virtually unknown. The accidental bearing of a child
would prove grossly inconvenient to its mother; so would the extra
cost in feeding and lost sleep due to the infant's cries... The last
mixture on the above list, Godfrey's Cordial, was a mixture of opium
and treacle, and the amount of each in the mixture was the object of
intense speculation in an 1843 report commissioned by Parliament."

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Sedation represented a strenuous attempt by parents, nurses, and drug vendors to tamper with nature and make infant care easy. For some upper- and middle-class women, and for working mothers, conception … [did not] suit their social and work habits … the one group who … did not use opium sedatives were Irish workers in England because they traditionally opposed opium preparations … [instead], Irish immigrants administered alcoholic beverages. [9]
     The last mixture on the above list, Godfrey's Cordial, was a mixture of opium and treacle, and the amount of each in the mixture was the object of intense speculation in an 1843 report commissioned by Parliament[10] :
It is often left to the apprentice to concoct, or to the chemist's wife. It stands in a great jug on the counter …
     The report notes that, while the cordial enjoyed brisk sales and a high turnover, no one actually kept track of the mixture inside the bottle. Opium, being fat-soluble, does not dissolve easily in water. Thus, over time, the opium might become concentrated in the bottom of the jug by falling out of solution, and he who got the last dose in the bottle might be in for a wild ride, especially if he couldn't even crawl on all fours yet. Additionally, the recommended doses for the various treatments were vague statements like "as necessary". Couple these instructions with the knowledge that many of the lower-class families who purchased the cordial were illiterate, and one very quickly imagines scores of ratty, slothful children getting a dollop of sweet-tasting opiate the moment they acted up. To make matters worse, the Godfrey's Cordial bottle was narrow-necked and very distinctive-looking; infants recognized it easily. Chepaitis cites another Parliamentary report that quotes apothecaries as saying,
I have seen little children in the shop put the neck of the bottle in their mouths and bite the cork, so fond are they of the preparation.
Another noted that children old enough to buy bottles from their parents from the store
… could not resist the temptation of drinking it until the whole was consumed before reaching home, so that the mothers were obliged to come for it themselves.[11]
     In another Parliamentary report, a seamstress named Mary Colton was able to drug her child for two days a week on 1/96 of her weekly paycheck, which made administering such a cordial economically feasible. For example, a working mother making $20,000 in 1998 dollars would be paying roughly twelve bucks a week to keep her child quiet. The sedated toddler allowed Mary to work her normal job and put food on the table, and he was too zonked to get himself into trouble. As Chepaitis puts it,
Infants were drugged at mid-day when mothers could not leave work to breastfeed them, and again when parents returned home exhausted from work. They were often unable or unwilling to share their little disposable time and their modest domestic haven with an active youngster. Since they could not put the little child out in the street, it was easier to sedate him again than to try to bully him into silence and immobility.
     Thus, time constraints brought on by the booming of industry forced generations of children into opium dependency. Sweet-tasting drugs allowed the same children to dose themselves effectively, and bypass the need for parents altogether. Until, that is, the subject of nutrition is approached.
Next week: nipple liniment and baby farms!
 



Footnotes
We may safely ignore incidences of ergot poisoning due to their unintentional and haphazard nature.
Brecher, 195 [Brecher, Edward M.] Licit and Illicit Drugs. Little, Brown and Co. Boston. 1972. ISBN: 0-316-15340-0]
Dr. Andrew T. Weil, in an unpublished article: "Every culture throughout history has made use of chemicals to alter consciousness - except the Eskimos, who had to wait for the white man to bring them alcohol, since they could not grow anything."
Robinson, p. 19, 20. [Robinson, Edward Forbes, The Early History of Coffee Houses in England. Regan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd. 1893.]
Dr. Crothers was also editor of the amusingly billed Journal of Inebriety.
Crothers, p. 303-4. [T.D. Crothers, Morphinism and Narcomanias from Other Drugs. W.B. Saunders & Co. Philadelphia. 1902.]
High doses of caffeine cause odd behavior in test animals. Rats will bite themselves enough to die from blood loss, prompting Consumers Union to observe, "Some readers may here be moved to protest that the bizarre behavior of rats fed massive doses of caffeine is irrelevant to the problems of human coffee drinkers, who are not very likely to bite themselves to death." We note that caffeine's relatively low lethal dose (~10 grams) may be administered by drinking 70-100 cups of coffee to the average human.
"Carminative" is a medical term dating back to medieval bodily humor theory. The idea was that wind grossly distorts the humors in a certain direction, or, as the OED delicately puts it, "Of medicines, etc.: Having the quality of expelling flatulence.[p. 214, Second Edition, 1994]" As for the drug's efficacy, we note that opium is currently used as an antidiarrheal, which does not particularly mesh with its alleged abilities as a degasser.
Chepaitis, p. 16-17
Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Papers, 1843, XV (Reports from Commissioners), "Children's Employment Commission," Q 30, as in Chepaitis, p. 52-3
Chepaitis, p. 55

One of the major causes of infant mortality was the widespread practice of giving children 
narcotics, especially opium, to quieten them. At 1 penny an ounce, laudanum was cheap 
enough - about the price of a pint of beer - and its sale was totally unregulated until 
late in the century. The use of opium was widespread both in town and country. In 
Manchester, according to one account, five out of six working-class families used it 
habitually. One Manchester druggist admitted selling a half gallon of Godfrey's Cordial 
(the most popular mixture, it contained opium, treacle, water, and spices) and between 
five and six gallons of what was euphemistically called "quietness" every week. At 
mid-century there were at least ten proprietary brands, with Godfrey's Cordial, Steedman's 
Powder, and the grandly named Atkinson's Royal Infants Preservative among the most 
popular. In East Anglia opium in pills and penny sticks was widely sold and opium-taking 
was described as a way of life there. Throughout the Fens it was used in "poppy tea," and 
doctors there reported how the infants were wasted from it - "shrank up into little old 
men," "wizened like little monkeys" is the way they were described. 
 
It seems, however, that infants died more from starvation than directly through Opium 
intake. A Doctor noted that children "kept in a state of continued narcotism will be 
thereby disinclined for food, and be but imperfectly nourished." The infants died from 
severe malnutrition, but the coroner was likely to record the death as "debility from 
birth," or "lack of breast milk," or simply "starvation." 
 
Another cause of infant mortality and hazardous childbirth was low nutritional standards. 
Many women were seriously anaemic and had rickets, which could cause contracted pelvises, 
making childbirth difficult. As late as the Edwardian period working-class women were 
gravely underweight and small in stature. In Manchester, just before the First World War, 
thirteen-year-old girls from working-class families were three inches shorter and eight 
pounds lighter than girls of a "good class"; they stood seven inches shorter and weighed 
twenty-three pounds less than girls of a similar age living in the 1950s. 
 
During the nineteenth century, much of the food consumed by the working-class family was 
contaminated by foreign substances and chemicals, or befouled by animal and human 
excrement. Mineral poisons were often introduced into food and water from bottle 
stoppers, water pipes, wall paints, or equipment used to process food and beverages. 
 
In 1872, for example, because of the Englishman's dislike for brown bread, bakers 
regularly whitened their flour with alum, which, although not poisonous, inhibited the 
digestion and lowered the nutritional value of other foods. 
 
If you think our foods today contain too many additives, read this: 
 
"The list of poisonous additives reads like the stock list of some mad and malevolent 
chemist: strychnine, cocculus inculus (both are hallucinogens) and copperas in rum and 
beer; sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine, and preserves; lead chromate in 
mustard and snuff; sulphate of iron in tea and beer; ferric ferrocynanide, lime sulphate, 
and turmeric in chinese tea; copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury, and 
Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate; lead in wine and cider; all were 
extensively used and were accumulative in effect, resulting, over a long period, in 
chronic gastritis, and, indeed, often fatal food poisoning. Red lead gave Gloucester 
cheese its 'healthy' red hue, flour and arrowroot a rich thickness to cream, and tea 
leaves were 'dried, dyed, and recycled again'." 
 
As late as 1877 a quarter of the milk contained excessive water, or chalk, and ten per 
cent of all the butter, over eight per cent of the bread, and 50 per cent of the gin had 
copper in them to heighten the color. Even luxury items for the relatively well off were 
hardly any better. Here are the tasty ingredients in a samples of ice cream: cocci, 
bacilli, torulae, cotton fiber, lice, bed bugs, bug's legs, fleas, straw, human hair, and 
cat and dog hair. Such contaminated ice cream caused diphtheria, scarlet fever, 
diarrhoea, and enteric fever. 
 
And if you're still worried about "mad cow disease", in 1862 it was estimated that 
one-fifth of butcher's meat in England and Wales came from animals which were 
"considerably diseased" or had died of pleuro-pneumonia, and anthacid or anthracoid 
diseases. 
 
Food was scarce, primitive and unhealthy. Few of the poor had ovens and had to rely 
either on open-fire pan cooking, buy their hot food out, or make do with cold meals. Even 
at the turn of the century social workers entering the homes of the poor to teach wives 
how to cook were aghast to discover that the family possessed only one pot, and that 
before their lesson in economy stews and soups could begin, the pot would have to be 
cleaned of the baby's bath water, or worse. As late as 1904 an official committee of 
inquiry was distressed to learn how few of the poor had sufficient utensils and appliances 
to cook at home. Primitive or non-existent cooking facilities, lack of cheap fuel, 
poverty, ignorance, and adulterated foods combined to produce a nation, by today's 
standards, of pygmies, who were under-nourished, anaemic, feeble and literally rickety. 
 
The urban poor ate tripe, slink (prematurely born calves), or broxy (diseased sheep). 
Some working-class families shopped for "tainted" pieces of meat and odds and ends of 
meat, the by-products of the butchering business. Sheep's heads at 3d each and American 
bacon at between 4d and 6d a pound (half the price of the native product) were too 
expensive for the irregularly-employed casual labourer to have frequently. In 
Macclesfield 23 per cent of the silk workers had never tasted meat. Stocking weavers, 
shoemakers, needle women and silk weavers ate less than one pound of meat a week and less 
than eight ounces of fats. 
 
It wasn't until the last quarter of the century that the working man's diet improved 
significantly. Between 1877 and 1889 the cost of the average national weekly food basket 
of butter, bread, tea, milk and meat fell by some 30 per cent, and it was in this period 
that the first really appreciable nutritional improvement (aided by a greater variety of 
foods and new methods of retailing), occurred. The cheaper food products that came in 
with the refrigerator, and then freezer-ships, the development of inexpensive margarine, 
the fall in price of most consumer items, all served to increase both the variety and 
quantity of the workmen's diet in this period. 
----
One of the most injurious of these patent medicines is a drink prepared with opiates, chiefly laudanum, under the name Godfrey's Cordial. Women who work at home, and have their own and other people's children to take care of, give them this drink to keep them quiet, and, as many believe, to strengthen them. They often begin to give this medicine to newly born children, and continue, without knowing the effects of this "heart's-ease", until the children die. The less susceptible the child's system to the action of the opium, the greater the quantities administered. When the cordial ceases to act, laudanum alone is given, often to the extent of fifteen to twenty drops at a dose. The Coroner of Nottingham testified before a Parliamentary Commission [7] that one apothecary had, according to his own statement, used thirteen hundredweight of treacle in one year in the preparation of Godfrey's Cordial. The effects upon the children so treated may be readily imagined. They are pale, feeble, wilted, and usually die before completing the second year. The use of this cordial is very extensive in all great towns and industrial districts in the kingdom.
From: Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845


Advertisement from Old Bailey Proceedings; Humphrey Parsons , Session II, Friday 15th January 1731
Friday 4th December 1730.
Dr. GODFREY's GENERAL CORDIAL,
So universally approved of for the CHOLICK, and all Manner of PAINS in the BOWELS, FLUXES, FEVERS, SMALL-POX, MEASLES, RHEUMATISM, COUGHS, COLDS, and RESTLESNESS in Men, Women, and Children, and particularly for several Ailments incident to Child bearing Women, and Relief of young Children in breeding their Teeth ,
Is Sold in most Cities , Boroughs, and Market-Towns throughout: Great-Britain and Ireland and in most public Streets in London; remov'd from Hunsdon to Broham in Hertfordshire : And for the Conveniency of supplying all those Parts, there are establish'd, by me BENJAMIN GODFREY, these following Whosesale Warehouses, viz.
John Westlake 's in Queen-street, Bristol; William Furly 's, Distiller, at the Black Prince in the Market-place in the City of Norwich.
Peter Leadbeater 's, Distiller, in West-Chester.
Mr. Button's, Bookseller, on the Bridge at Newcastle upon Tyne.
Mr. Brook's, Distiller, on the Blind-Key, Dublin.
As also at my Original Warehouse, facing Angel-Alley in Bishopsgate-street, without Bishopsgate, London.
Any reputable Shopkeeper in any City, Borough, or Market-Town, where this Medicine is not already sold, may be supplied at any of the said Warehouses, with good Allowance.
N. B. The Publick are desired to take Notice, (to prevent being imposed on) that there is an ill-minded Person who counterfeits the said Medicine, and puts the Title of Godfrey's Cordial on the Top of the Bottles, and in his Bills given with the Bottles, he calls it The GENERAL CORDIAL, and does not put the Person's Name who prepares it; but as this Counterfeit Maker is now found out by his own Confession, he and his Sellers will be prosecuted as the Law directs. ONE of the unfair Sellers of the sham Medicine without the Maker's Name who prepares it , is at a Silver-Smith's near Lombard-Street , another is at a Cheesemonger's facing Devonshire-Square in Bishopsgate-Street. But , to prevent the Buyers from being imposed on, I have put my Christian Name on the Top of each Bottle, as in the Margin, which is prepared.
By me BENJAMIN GODFREY, M. D.
The Price of each Bottle is 6 d.
John Taylor , Agent for Merchants,

[Stanley]

Bumped. Still worth a read!

[Tripps]

Perhaps for us pedants - the title could be changed from Geoffrey's to Godfrey's?

[Stanley]

You're right David. I shall attend to it!

[PanBiker]

You need a new post like this to pick up the change in the title of the thread. All following posts should have the same updated reference.

[Stanley]

Has that cured it?

[PanBiker]

I altered the title in my previous post to match your topic change. All from that post onwards should use the new title.

[Stanley]

Thanks....

[Stanley]

Still a useful compendium of references to the use of opiates.