the opium content of laudanum, are still sometimes used to treat diarrhea.Galen (131–c. 199), Paracelsus (1493–1541), Thomas Sydenham (1624–1689), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834),Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859), Hector Berlioz (1803–1869)
Illustrious figures from medicine, literature, and music have been linked to laudanum. For 1,500 years, the practice of medicine was dominated by the teachings of Galen, whose prescription “galenicals” contained dozens of plant and extraneous ingredients. These prescriptions remained unchallenged until the sixteenth century, when the Swiss-German scientist and physician Paracelsus vociferously advocated the use of simple, specific compounds for the treatment of disease. Paracelsus’s “simple” laudanum (from Latin laudare, “to praise”) contained opium, gold, and pearls in an alcohol base and was recommended for pain relief. Thomas Sydenham, the so-called English Hippocrates, further simplified this prescription in 1676 with his opium powder (10 percent) in alcohol. With Sydenham’s imprimatur and further promotion by his medical successors, laudanum was prescribed for a range of maladies.
The wonders of opium and its proclivity to cause addiction were popularized by Thomas de Quincey, who first used laudanum in 1804 to treat trigeminal neuralgia (extreme facial nerve pain) and remained a life-long addict. In his autobiographical 1821 book, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he wrote, “Here was a panacea . . . for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness . . . at once discovered.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another longtime addict, famously reconstructed a laudanum-induced dream about thirteenth-century Chinese emperor Kublai Khan as a poem but was interrupted after writing only 54 of 200–300 lines. The fourth movement of French composer Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830)—said to be inspired by de Quincey’s work—describes the protagonist attempting suicide with opium (perhaps laudanum) and instead experiencing a frightening dream in which he murders his beloved.
During the nineteenth century, laudanum was widely used by the general population—frequently as an undisclosed ingredient in patent medicines to treat “female disorders” and to quiet crying infants. Opium tincture (the contemporary designation of laudanum) and camphorated opium tincture (paregoric), which contains the opium content of laudanum, are still sometimes used to treat diarrhea.
SEE ALSO Opium (c. 2500 BCE), Patent Medicines (1623).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the age of forty-two still had not completed his planned poem from twenty years earlier—a poem that stemmed from his laudanum-induced sleep and ensuing dream of the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan.