ABSTRACT
From the early nineteenth century there was a constant and increasingly urgent search for a greater understanding of properties and effects of opium. Case-histories of accidental and intentional opium poisonings, articles on toxicology, and reports of clinical lectures, began to litter the pages of the growing number of medical journals and the popular press. Opium was a remedy in the trained hands of physicians but a deadly poison in the grasp of the common people; the druggists shop was the grand emporium for the careless sale of the drug. During the early nineteenth century, the process of medical professionalisation and the publication of new medical journals, the debate over the drug were beginning to enter a larger, more critically concerned professional and public consciousness which would begin to crystallize in theories, treatments and attitudes. Medical knowledge was not an autonomous system of thought: social, cultural, political and commercial spheres influenced the direction and choice of physicians in diseases and therapies.
