Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The opium poppy in Hellenistic and Roman medicine
- 2 Exotic substances: the introduction and global spread of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, and distilled liquor, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
- 3 Pharmacological experimentation with opium in the eighteenth century
- 4 The regulation of the supply of drugs in Britain before 1868
- 5 Das Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt (Imperial Health Office) and the chemical industry in Germany during the Second Empire: partners or adversaries?
- 6 From all purpose anodyne to marker of deviance: physicians' attitudes towards opiates in the US from 1890 to 1940
- 7 Changes in alcohol use among Navajos and other Indians of the American Southwest
- 8 The drug habit: the association of the word ‘drug’ with abuse in American history
- 9 Research and development in the UK pharmaceutical industry from the nineteenth century to the 1960s
- 10 AIDS, drugs, and history
- 11 Anomalies and mysteries in the ‘War on Drugs’
- Glossary
- Index
6 - From all purpose anodyne to marker of deviance: physicians' attitudes towards opiates in the US from 1890 to 1940
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The opium poppy in Hellenistic and Roman medicine
- 2 Exotic substances: the introduction and global spread of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, and distilled liquor, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries
- 3 Pharmacological experimentation with opium in the eighteenth century
- 4 The regulation of the supply of drugs in Britain before 1868
- 5 Das Kaiserliche Gesundheitsamt (Imperial Health Office) and the chemical industry in Germany during the Second Empire: partners or adversaries?
- 6 From all purpose anodyne to marker of deviance: physicians' attitudes towards opiates in the US from 1890 to 1940
- 7 Changes in alcohol use among Navajos and other Indians of the American Southwest
- 8 The drug habit: the association of the word ‘drug’ with abuse in American history
- 9 Research and development in the UK pharmaceutical industry from the nineteenth century to the 1960s
- 10 AIDS, drugs, and history
- 11 Anomalies and mysteries in the ‘War on Drugs’
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
although opiates are among the oldest medicines known to human kind, they continue to spark new discoveries in the workings of the brain. And although they remain of interest at the cutting edge of pharmacological research, opiates continue to be mired in intractable social problems. This essay examines the attitudes of physicians toward opiates from about 1890 to 1940. As part of the larger effort to transform medicine into a powerful and self-regulating profession in this period, American physicians sought to increase their control over the distribution of medicines to the sick. In the late nineteenth century, the harm associated with the unregulated American drug market provoked reformers both within and without the profession to action. Opiates were a target of concern because of their prevalence in proprietary medicines, their centrality in therapeutics, their association with symptom-relieving rather than curative medicine, and the risk they posed for addiction. To gauge these concerns, I will examine two kinds of sources. First, charting the actions of the American Medical Association (AMA) shows the role of opiates in the public effort to transform medicine and shake off charges of iatrogenic addiction. Second, within the profession, more private concerns about opiates in medical practice can be traced by surveying textbooks and manuals of materia medica and therapeutics.
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- Drugs and Narcotics in History , pp. 114 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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