ABSTRACT
Recent scholarly work on the history of opiate addiction has drawn attention to a gender shift that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Over the course of this period, the image of the typical drug abuser was transformed from an educated upper-class woman into an unskilled working-class man (Courtwright 2001; Campbell 2000; Kandall 1996; Strausser and Attia 2002; Acker 2002, 1–2). Contrary to today’s conception of drug abuse as a primarily male problem, morphinism, or morphinomania, was originally primarily associated with women. As David Courtwright has stated, in his extensive study of the history of opiate addiction in America, ‘the outstanding feature of nineteenth-century opium and morphine addiction is that the majority of addicts were women’ (Courtwright 2001, 38). Estimates of the number of American addicts suggest that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the total were female (Kandall 1996, 15). British historians have similarly pointed to a link between morphine use and women (Zieger 2005; Seddon 2008; see also Kohn 1992). According to these studies, medical practice in the late nineteenth century was the main reason for this predominance of women among the addicted population. Women were seen as less capable of managing painful conditions than men, and therefore as being in greater need of opium and morphine, which was liberally dispensed to them by male physicians. As has been noted by Mara L. Keire, doctors injected women with morphine ‘to numb the pain of ‘female trouble’, or to turn the wilful hysteric into a manageable invalid. Up through the turn of the century, morphine was a literal prescription for bourgeois femininity’ (Keire 1998, 809; see also Palmer and Horowitz 1982).
