'The Unhappy Victims of This Habit': Drug Addiction as a Problem in Nineteenth-Century America

Trinity Long Room Hub Podcasts · Dec 9, 2022 · 43m

Recorded September 22, 2022. An online seminar by Dr Kelly Gray as part of the Medical & Health Humanities Seminar Series in association with Trinity Long Room Hub. Drug dependency became an increasingly serious problem in nineteenth-century America, and most of this use began with medical use. The problem remained largely hidden until the late 1860s, because habitual opiate users did not behave erratically and therefore went largely unnoticed. Americans of the era learned about drug addiction from reading accounts of such use abroad, and many dismissed the notion that the problem existed at…