WHAT WAS THE CONDITION OF SOCIETY IN THE 19TH CENTURY?

[Stanley]

WHAT WAS THE CONDITION OF SOCIETY IN THE 19TH CENTURY?
[DRAFT. NOT BE QUOTED]
One of the hardest judgements we have to make when looking at industrial and social conditions during the evolution of Britain from an agrarian economy to the ‘workshop of the world’ is deciding what the general perception was at the time when assessing the quality of life or standard of living of people of any class. It is far too easy to assert that the Agrarian Utopia was good and the Dark Satanic Mills bad. Apart from being bad history it is obviously wrong because individual experiences varied so much.

I start from my own working experience and recognise that the hours of work and conditions which I found quite acceptable, indeed, largely enjoyable, would in most cases be not only anathema to modern workers but actually illegal. If this perception can change so radically over sixty years it raises the question as to what was the common frame of reference in the nineteenth century. Our view may be of badly paid, ill-housed and maltreated factory workers but was their experience seen by them as better or worse than their experience in the agrarian economy? Was a child in a factory better or worse off than one working for a hard-pressed father in the domestic textile industry? Was a pregnant, working mother better off in a semi-isolated farm cottage or a terraced house in a city slum where she could get help and support from neighbours? Was there a universal perception?

The truth is almost certainly that all levels of society lived in what we would regard as insanitary, uncomfortable and potentially dangerous conditions with ignorant or incompetent medical provision. A prince of the realm could die from a mild infection or suffer incredibly from medical procedures in just the same way as the lowest labourer or his family. How then can we make judgements about how the wealthy regarded their lot in life or that of people in classes they regarded as below theirs?

I think the short answer is ‘with difficulty’. Historians and demographers have struggled to extract contemporary information that gives some indication of the relative standards accepted by both rich and poor. The general picture is that access to what comfort and security was available was easier for the rich than the poor but that the rich, particularly in the early days of the rise of manufacture, saw their quality of life and standards of living as resulting from their good fortune and regarded the lower standards of the common people as the norm. They did not necessarily think that they could do anything about it beyond charity and a reasonable concern. Indeed, as long as the poor bred fast enough and produced enough labour to keep the system going, where was the need for more enlightened thinking?

The rise of the great manufacturing towns drew in hordes of workers from the country creating a tremendous demand for housing. Speculative builders saw the opportunity and threw up vast numbers of dwellings crowded together, built to the lowest standards and completely devoid of amenities such as running water or adequate facilities for disposing of waste. These conditions proved to be the ideal breeding grounds for highly infectious and deadly diseases such as Cholera and Typhus which could kill hundreds and thousands in a few weeks. This was terrible by anyone’s standards and gave rise to the widely held perception, both then and now, that life at the base of the industrial pyramid was a hell on earth.

There was a problem, disease didn’t respect class or wealth and it could spread up the hill to the big houses. Early in the 19th century it became apparent that the seat of the outbreaks was in the worker’s housing and public pressure started to build for sanitary improvements. Later in the century another factor came into play when recruitment for the armed forces was affected by the low physical standards of the available candidates. These pressures stimulated research into the causes of disease and low levels of ‘Physical Efficiency’ and promoted interest in sanitary reform. The miasmic theory of disease gave way to a recognition that the real enemies were dirty water and living conditions, overcrowding and adulterated food.

The tide of reform grew and in 1848 Parliament passed the Public Health Act which created a central Board of Health with powers to supervise street cleansing, improvements to water supplies and better waste disposal. During the next thirty years more specific acts were passed setting up local boards of health with powers to act in their own areas.

The first targets for improvement were, quite understandably, the worst sinks of corruption. Town Rate payers saw immense amounts of money being spent on the worst areas and an influential opposition rose against these expenditures on the grounds that they were ‘Municipal Socialism’. Though this never stopped the overall pressure for improvement, there were local instances where the pace was slowed until the message was brought home that this was the most efficient way to attack the killer diseases.

The summer of 1849 provided a powerful argument for the advocates of sanitary reform. Over 33,000 people died in Britain from Cholera, 13,000 in London alone. As the death rate was approximately 50% this meant that double that number were seriously ill. The cause of Cholera would not be positively identified until 1854 but the 1849 epidemic, added to those of previous years, spurred the debate forward and one very concrete result was that the Morning Chronicle in London initiated one of the greatest surveys ever attempted into the social condition of England.

“WE PUBLISH this day,” announced the Morning Chronicle of October 18, 1849, “the first of a series of communications, in which it is proposed to give a full and detailed description of the moral, intellectual, material, and physical condition of the industrial poor throughout England.” The undertaking, which continued until the end of the following year under the heading ‘LABOUR AND THE POOR’ was described by a nineteenth century historian of the English Press as “an unparalleled exploit in journalism”; and E. P. Thompson has said that the correspondents' reports form “the most impressive survey of labour and poverty at mid-century which exists” But apart from the London section, which was the work of Henry Mayhew, the project has been almost entirely forgotten. In particular, the reports of Angus Bethune Reach for the Chronicle on the Lancashire and Yorkshire textile districts sank into obscurity. 1 Mayhew left the Morning Chronicle and continued his investigations, this was the start of his master work; London Labour and London Poor. Reach’s career ended in retirement due to illness in 1854 and death in 1856. His reports mouldered in the archives, disturbed occasionally by an assiduous researcher but largely forgotten until Mr Aspin and the Helmshore Local History Society resurrected them.

The Morning Chronicle, introducing the survey, stated; “No man of feeling or reflection can look abroad without being shocked and startled by the sight of enormous wealth and unbounded luxury, placed in direct juxtaposition with the lowest extremes of indigence and privation. Is this contrast a necessary result of the unalterable laws of nature, or simply the sure indication of an effete social system?"

I find this extract particularly telling, it signals to me that in a time of unprecedented change and wealth creation there was genuine consternation that the contrast between the life experience of rich and poor was so great and there was uncertainty whether this was due to ‘the unalterable laws of nature’, an echo of the medieval Chain of Being, or a sign that there was a need for some basic readjustment of society. It is never voiced but do we detect the faint dawning of realisation that perhaps redistribution of wealth might be one of the keys to the solution? What is certain is that as long as pockets of disease and deprivation were hidden in the depths of the agrarian economy they could be comfortably ignored. In an age where the concept of popular revolution was abroad, when whole districts of major towns and cities were affected and disease was rife, the problem had to be recognised and addressed.

Reach was a good investigator. He made it his business to see the places of work and the housing. He questioned his informants, noted their diet and health and sought their opinions on trade, levels of income and iniquity. The picture he paints is one of abject poverty brought about by circumstance over which his subjects had no control. He seems to be genuinely concerned and is not afraid to voice this in his reports. The only hint of prejudice that creeps through is the frequently used pejorative phrase ‘The Low Irish’; he leaves us in little doubt that he views them with a degree of contempt. He also had a rather quaint dislike of front doors which led directly from the street into the living room. A house without a hall or lobby was seriously deficient in his view.

Two things strike me particularly about Reach’s accounts of what he found. The first is that apart from general comments on the quantity and wholesomeness of food, he makes no allusion to adulteration. This could be because he was not aware that it was happening. I cannot imagine him keeping silent unless this was the case. The other is that he actively pursued a line of enquiry which I have never seen investigated in such depth in contemporary accounts. He asks direct questions of his informants, pharmacists and medical men about the use of soporific drugs, both by adults as a substitute for alcohol and their use as ‘pacifiers’ to make child care easier. It is this evidence I wish to concentrate on.

DRUGGED TO DEATH.
It is very striking, particularly in the textile industries of the North of England, how the concept of the ‘family wage’ was generally accepted until the middle of the 20th century. The mills offered employment for men, women and children and any study of the census returns for the 19th century leaves us in no doubt that the norm was that as soon as children were old enough to work in the mill they started earning and ‘tipping up’ their wage in return for pocket money. This was not wholly a bad thing because it meant that a large family could command a joint income high enough to buy their house and perhaps the one next door as well to provide income in old age. I have found instances in Barnoldswick of men who have achieved a good post in the mill, say as an overlooker or taper, and having a large working family were able to build a row of houses including a shop and thus ensure some diversification of income and a cushion against poverty in bad times. Not everyone could aspire to this level of capitalism but the minimum aim was to have some sort of security for old age, fear of the workhouse was very real.

Many of the poor people that Reach interviewed were in a classic poverty trap. Let us take the case of a hypothetical young married couple living in a rented house and both able to gain employment in the factory. Wage levels were dictated by the economics of the market. In the short term, periods of high demand forced wages up because of the shortage of labour with the necessary skills. In the long term, a pool of excess labour, constantly replenished by incomers from the country districts, ensured that the lowest wage possible was paid by the entrepreneurs. The consequence was that the norm was a bare subsistence wage in periods of stability in the market.

There were two ways in which our young couple could raise their wage and standard of living. One was by advancement to better jobs because of their individual worth. In practice, these better jobs were scarce and in most cases not attainable. The other, long term route to enhanced income was to rear enough children to raise the family wage to a point where there was enough disposable income to live well and make provision for hard times or old age. The catch was of course that it took time and investment to rear the children. If the woman was disabled by pregnancy or childbirth and could not work the family income dropped below subsistence level. Despite these disadvantages, the normal urge to procreate won in the end and there were many families disadvantaged by having extra mouths to feed.

In these circumstances, as soon as the mother had recovered from childbirth it was essential that she got back to work. This raised the problem of childcare because, even in what we would regard as terrible conditions, leaving young children in the house alone all day was unacceptable. The universal solution to this was the ‘childminder’. These were sometimes aged relatives but due to fragmentation of the extended family by migration more usually they were older women who were past their time of usefulness in the workplace and had to find lower class work to survive. Very often this was the combined trade of washerwoman and childminder. Babes in arms were deposited with the childminder and left there for the day.

The textile mills started early in the morning but it was the custom to stop at around 8am for half an hour for breakfast. In many cases this was the time when the young mother would slip out of the mill, go home for her baby, feed it and deliver it to the childminder. With luck she might be able to visit in the dinner hour and suckle the infant again. The childminder had the child all day and it was to her advantage if the child stayed quiet and undemanding so that she could get on with whatever her other occupation was.

Anyone who has ever looked after a baby for the day, never mind a dozen or even more, will know that it is a full-time occupation. Baby’s cry, need changing and demand attention. The childminders had a remedy for this, they used ‘pacifiers’. Nowadays this usually means a dummy teat but in those days it was something far more efficacious and many a time deadly. The child was given a dose of cordial containing an opiate. This put it to sleep and it would remain still and quiet for as long as it took the drug to wear off.

Before looking at this in more detail we should pause in order to adjust our frame of reference. We should remember that it was not until the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920, banning opiates and cocaine, that over-the-counter sale of what we now regard as ‘illegal drugs’ was stopped. From ancient times, and certainly in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries Opium and its derivatives were highly regarded as efficaceous in medicine, desireable as a substitute for alcohol and conducive to the achievement of higher realms of thinking. Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) wrote of “the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for pain”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote Kubla Khan in a dream-like trance while under its spell. Until the nineteenth century, the only opiates used medicinally or recreationally took the form of crude opium and its derivatives. Opium is a complex chemical cocktail containing numerous alkaloids. These opiate alkaloids are of inestimable value in medicine because they reduce or abolish pain without causing a loss of consciousness. They also relieve coughs, spasms, fevers and diarrhoea.

A significant advance in opium processing occurred in the sixteenth century. 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. In 1680, Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) standardised 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. In 1805 a German pharmacist called Wilhelm Sertürner isolated Morphine from Opium and named it Morphium after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. It was believed for a long time that morphine was not addictive, indeed as late as the early years of the 20th century, missionaries in China gave what became known colloquially as ‘Jesus Pills’ to opium addicts to wean them off their habit. The principle ingredient of these was morphine. In 1874, an English pharmacist, C.R. Alder Wright, boiled morphine and acetic acid to produce diacetylmorphine. This was synthesized and marketed commercially by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer and in 1898 they launched the best-selling drug of all time, Heroin. The year before, Bayer formulated Aspirin, and launched this on the world market.

In the Old Bailey Proceedings; Humphrey Parsons , Session II, Friday 15th January 1731 there appeared the following advertisement, dated 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. This ‘General Cordial’ was a mixture of treacle, laudanum and sassafras or some other flavour and despite the long list of ailments it was supposed to relieve it was the universal weapon of choice for alleviating ‘restlessness’ in children.

Having absorbed these facts and transferring them to the world view of our young couple and their contemporaries we can be fairly certain that they would not regard opiates as anything other than a friendly helper, freely available and uncontested as an analgesic until 1897 with the advent of aspirin. Use of these drugs for pain familiarised them with their side effects and it was widely recognised that a fractious child could be put to sleep by a small dose of Laudanum. Many a mother, exhausted by a days work in the mill, pressed by domestic duties at home and desperate for sleep herself would have gained respite by administering a small dose of an opiate. Little wonder that one of the common brands sold by the pharmacist was called ‘Infant's Quietness’.

The childminder used the same technology but on a commercial scale. She soon found that the best way to manage her day was by administering a dose to the infant as a matter of routine. There were two problems with this practice. The first was that the infants became inured to the effects of opiates over time and in order to get them to sleep, the childminder had to administer larger doses. Pharmacists made up their own version of Godfrey’s General Cordial, often giving it a reassuring name, Mother's Helper, Atkinson's Preservative, Dalby's Carminative, Soothing Syrup and James’ Fever Mixture to name but a few I have found. Herein lay our second problem, there was no standard formula and in the words of one retailer interviewed by Reach; “Children are drugged either with Godfrey's Cordial or stronger decoctions of opium. Every druggist makes his own Godfrey, and the stronger he makes it, the faster it is bought.” This variation in strength could result in an unintentional fatal dose caused by the pursuit of greater sales and profit by the chemist.

We have evidence in Reach of the fatal consequences which could ensue. Here is one of his accounts: “An intelligent male operative in the Messrs. Morris's mill in Salford stated that he and his wife put out their first child to be nursed. The nurse gave the baby “sleeping stuff” and it died in nine weeks. …… The mother had to get up at four o'clock and carry it to the nurse's every morning but the distance was too far for her to suckle it at noon so the child had no milk until the nurse brought it home at night. The mother can often smell laudanum in the child's breath when it comes home. As for mothers themselves, they give the “sleeping stuff” principally at night to secure their own rest.” This service cost the parents 3/6 (17p) a week. Again from Reach: “Another operative in the same mill gave the following evidence: He had put out one child to nurse, and he and his missus had sorely rued it ever since. The child, a girl, had never been healthy or strong, and the doctors told them when she was 14 months old that she had been dosed.” This service cost 5/- (25p) a week but enabled the mother to earn 15/-.

We have evidence from other sources. 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, ….. 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.” Again, 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.”

Despite the public acceptance of these opiate cordials and there over-the-counter sales it is significant that Reach encountered some informants who wished to minimise the scale of the trade. He reported the following encounter; “Among the druggists who were obviously disingenuous upon the point, I may particularly mention one not far from the Rochdale-road. He tried to pooh-pooh the whole thing. “He sold nothing of the kind, at least next to nothing, nothing worth mentioning. Oh, no. The fact was that a great deal of nonsense was talked upon the subject. Isolated cases might be found, but to say there was anything like a general practice of drugging children was to raise a mere bugbear.” Now, during our conversation, which occupied about five minutes, my cool and candid friend actually suited the action to the word by handing over the counter, to two little girls, three distinct pennyworths of the very drug the demand for which he was resolutely denying! I would have given something for that gentleman's power of face. I think it could be made useful.”

Another druggist told me of a common feature in this hocusing system. The women go to shops where the “cordial” is made weak, and where a certain quantity, say half a teaspoonful, is prescribed as a dose. Afterwards they go to shops where the mixture is made stronger, and without making any further inquiry buy the drug and give the child the old dose. Yet some of the druggists, said this gentleman, “put twice or thrice as much laudanum into their Godfrey as others.”

By a druggist carrying on an extensive business in a low neighbourhood in Ancoats, inhabited almost exclusively by a mill population, I was informed that personally he did not sell much narcotic medicine, but that it was tolerably extensively vended in small "general shops", the owners of which bought the drug by gallons from certain establishments which he named. He informed me also that he was in the habit of making Godfrey without putting laudanum into it, a system, from all I hear, very much akin to making grog without spirits. He affirmed, however, that the carminative ingredients, used for flatulence, constituted an important element of the medicine, and one for which it was frequently bought. He expressed his belief that the drugging system was gradually going out, and that the “old women” and midwives, who were its great patrons, were losing their hold upon the mill population. Recipes, which had been handed down in families for generations, and which often contained dangerous quantities of laudanum, were occasionally brought to him to make up, but he found little difficulty in convincing their possessors of the noxious character of the ingredients, when he was sometimes allowed to change their proportions. Sometimes a half-emptied bottle of cordial would be brought, in order that more laudanum might be put into it - a request which he always met by pretending to comply with it, and sending the applicant away with the contents of the phial increased by a few drops of harmless tincture. The mortality among infants in Manchester this gentleman attributed not to narcotics, but to careless nursing and insufficient and unwholesome suckling. “When women work nearly all day in a hot and close temperature, and live for the most part upon slops, their milk does children more harm than good. Infants are suckled hastily at dinner time, while the mother is eating her own meal, and then they are left foodless until well on in the evening. The consequence is a train of stomach complaints, which carries them off like pestilence. Children who had been drugged with “sleeping stuff” he could recognize in a moment. They never appeared fairly awake. Their whole system appeared to be sunk into a stagnant state.” He believed that when such doses were administered, nurses were chiefly to blame; for mothers often came to him with their ailing children, asking, in great trouble, whether he thought that “sleeping stuff” had anything to do with the child's illness. The proportion of illegitimate children carried off through inefficient nursing was terrible. As to adults, he knew that a good deal of opium and laudanum was taken by them. Women were his chief customers in that way. He had seen a girl drink off an ounce-and-a-half of laudanum as it was handed to her over the counter. Most of these people had begun by taking laudanum under medical advice and had continued the practice until it became habitual.

While we were talking, another druggist entered the shop and confirmed the main points of the above statement. He added that when he was an apprentice, twenty years ago [1829], in a country place, principally inhabited by hand-loom weavers, his master used to make Godfrey in a large boiler by twenties and thirties of gallons at a brew. He believed that the people did not drug their children half so much now-a-days. Coroners' inquests were good checks. Almost all the laudanum he sold was disposed of in pennyworths. “A great number of old women took it for rheumatism."

I beg , however, to direct particular attention to the following evidence, given by a most intelligent druggist carrying on a very large business in a poor neighbourhood surrounded by mills, and a gentleman of whose perfect candour and good faith I have certain knowledge: “Laudanum, in various forms, is used to some extent by the adult population, male and female, and to a terrible extent for very young children. I sell about 2s. worth a week of laudanum, in pennyworths, for adults. Some use raw opium instead. They either chew it or make it into pills and swallow it. The country people use laudanum as a stimulant, as well as the town people. On market days, they come in from Lymm and Warrington, and buy the pure drug for themselves, and 'Godfrey' or 'Quietness' for the children. Habitual drunkards often give up spirits and take to laudanum as being cheaper and more intensely stimulating. Another class of customers is middle-aged prostitutes. They take it when they get low and melancholy. Three of them came together into my shop last night for opium to relieve pains in their limbs. These women swallow the drug in great quantities. As regards children, they are commonly dosed either with 'Godfrey' or 'Infant's Quietness’. The first is an old fashioned preparation and has been more or less in vogue for near a century. It is made differently by different vendors, but generally speaking it contains an ounce and a half of pure laudanum to the quart. The dose is from half a teaspoonful to two teaspoonfuls. Infant's Cordial, or Mixture, is stronger, containing on the average two ounces of laudanum to a quart. Occasionally paregoric, which is one-fourth part as strong as laudanum, is used. Mothers sometimes give narcotics to their children, but most commonly the nurses are at fault. The stuff is frequently administered by the latter without the mothers' knowledge, but it is occasionally given by the mothers without the fathers' knowledge. I believe that women frequently drug their children through pure ignorance of the effect of the practice, and because, having been brought up in the mills, they know nothing about the first duties of mothers. The nurses sometimes take children for 1s. 6d. a week. They are very often laundresses. Half-a-crown a week may be the average charge of the nurse, and the 'nursing' commonly consists of laying the infant in a cradle to doze all day in a stupefied state produced by a teaspoonful of 'Godfrey' or 'Quietness.' Bad as the practice is, it would not be so fatal if the nurses and parents would obey the druggists' instructions in administering the medicine. But this is what often takes place. A woman comes and buys pennorths of 'Godfrey’. Well, all is right for five or six weeks. Then she begins to complain that we don't make the 'Godfrey' so good as we used to do; that she has to give the child more than it needed at first; and so nothing will do but she must have 'Infant's Quietness' instead, for, as she says, she has heard that it is better, i.e. stronger. But in process of time, as the child gets accustomed to the drug, the dose must be made stronger still. Then the nurses, and sometimes the mothers, take to making the stuff themselves. They buy pennorths of aniseed, and treacle and sugar, add the laudanum to it, and make the dose as strong as they like. The midwives teach them how to brew it, and if the quantity of laudanum comes expensive, they use crude opium instead. Of course numberless children are carried off in this way. I know a child that has been so treated at once; it looks like a little old man or woman. I can tell one in an instant. Often and often a mother comes here with a child that has been out to nurse, to know what can be the matter with it. I know, but frequently I dare hardly tell, for if I say what I am sure of, the mother will go to the nurse and charge her with sickening the child; the nurse will deny, point blank, that she did anything of the sort, and will come and make a disturbance here, daring me to prove what of course I can't prove legally, and abusing me for taking away her character. The children also suffer from the period which elapses between the times of their being sucked. The mothers often live on vegetables and drink quantities of thin ale, and the consequence is that the children are terribly subject to weakening attacks of diarrhoea.”

As historians we must make our own decisions as to the veracity of our sources. Reach’s testimony rings true and is the most comprehensive and valuable evidence I have found on the use of opiates in the 19th Century. Reading his reports one can have little doubt that our hypothetical young couple are representative of many thousands in similar circumstances. Even though they knew of the dangers, economic circumstance forced them to accept the use of opiates and even worse, the terrible childminders. I hope that there were occasional instances of kindly and conscientious women in the trade but I think we are safe in assuming that the majority were using ‘pacifiers’ to ill effect.

There is a thread of unease with the system running through Reach’s reports. He condemned the practice and in his evidence we find responsible men agreeing with him. The obfuscation of the druggist who said the practice didn’t exist whilst selling the stuff openly while Reach was there is particularly telling. The coroner’s reports leave little doubt as to what official attitudes were but it was not to be addressed adequately until 1920 with the passing of the Dangerous Drugs Act.

I started this investigation by trying to assess what the contemporary perception would have been to the dreadful social conditions of the mid 19th Century in the working class areas of our industrial cities and towns. I still believe that there was a greater tolerance to bad conditions than we would have today but cannot accept that the working poor were so insensitive that they would not feel revulsion against the worst aspects of their condition and have a desire to improve their lot. In particular, abusing children by drugging them because of economic necessity must have been anathema, mother love was as powerful an instinct then as now.

So, my conclusion is that trapped by economic forces beyond their control they were forced to live in sub-human conditions and even drug their children to death. The more brutal their lives, the lower the standards they accepted. The evidence that resentment existed is probably most clearly proved by the political movements that gathered pace during the 19th Century which resulted in the massive political changes we see at the turn of the century. The circumstances we have looked at not only spawned Cholera and a system of drug abuse but eventually, a more fair and just society.

EPILOGUE
In the course of researching this subject I have asked questions of knowledgeable people and was surprised to learn that certain modern children’s medicines, though never described as ‘pacifiers’, are well known to have this effect. So, contrary to my initial belief, drugs capable of ‘pacifying’ children can still be bought over the counter. There is also the thorny question of the use of prescription drugs such as Ritalin, a central nervous system stimulant used in the treatment of narcolepsy in adults and attention deficit disorder in children, this contains methylphenidate which produces a calming effect.

So, as is often the case, my probing into history answers one question about the use of pacifiers to manage children but raises another disturbing thought. It strikes me that there is a connection between the case of the poor textile workers we have been looking at and today’s world. Economic pressures have forced many mothers back into the workplace just as they did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Use of the crèche and nursery school is the modern version of the childminder. Have the stresses and pressures of modern life made us take another retrograde step? Are we still drugging our children to pacify them and in some cases, could they be Drugged to Death?

I found another, even more disturbing example of the use of pacifiers. Research published in the British Medical Journal in March 2003 focused on 698 elderly people in Bristol, of whom 172 were nursing home residents. Although the nursing home residents on the whole had fewer medically diagnosed problems, they were being given more drugs than elderly people living at home. The authors found 28% in nursing homes were on anti-psychotic drugs compared to 11% of those living at home, they were also three times more likely to receive a laxative. The conclusion the researchers reached confirmed suggestions of inappropriate drug use on elderly people, particularly in nursing homes.

Even Reach, in his investigations of 1849 into the worst conditions of British society, raised no question of drugs being used to manage old people. Is what we have report progress?


SCG/20 July 2005
6109 words