Comments by "craxd1" (@craxd1) on "Germ Theory and Living in the Past" video.

  1. They had started experimenting with opium, and what became Laudanum, in the sixteenth century. By the time of the Civil War, in the US, they also had Morphine (1820s), but the supply was sometimes low, thus, you got the patient drunk on whiskey before surgery. They also had chloroform at that time, but, again, the supply needed wasn't enough. "The most influential work [on opium] was by George Young, who published a comprehensive medical text entitled Treatise on Opium (1753). Young, an Edinburgh surgeon and physician, wrote this to counter an essay on opium by his contemporary Charles Alston, professor of botany and materia medica at Edinburgh, who had recommended the use of opium for a wide variety of conditions. Young countered this by emphasising the risks '...that I may prevent such mischief as I can, I here give it as my sincere opinion... that opium is a poison by which great numbers are daily destroyed.' Young gives a comprehensive account of the indications for the drug, including its complications. He is critical about writers whose knowledge of the drug is based on chemical or animal experiments rather than clinical practice. The treatise is a detailed, balanced, and valuable guide to prevailing knowledge and practice. As it gained popularity, opium, and after 1820, morphine, was mixed with a wide variety of agents, drugs, and chemicals including mercury, hashish, cayenne pepper, ether, chloroform, belladonna, whiskey, wine, and brandy."__Wiki on Laudanum. During the Opium Wars, both the US and UK knew of the practical medical uses of opium, especially the Scots. The Civil War was what caused the great addiction to opioids, which, eventually, brought about the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1915.
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