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Victorian Housewives Weren’t Naturally Serene, They Were on Some Pretty Wild Drugs

Victorian doctors and patent medicines routinely offered women opiates, sedatives, and alcohol for “female complaints.”

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Picture the ideal Victorian housewife — serene, compliant, presiding over her household with grace and very little complaint. Now picture what was in her medicine cabinet. Bromides. Chloral hydrate. Tully’s powder, which was morphine mixed with camphor. Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which was advertised as an herbal remedy for “female complaints” and was around 40 proof. The serenity had some chemical assistance.

Victorian doctors prescribed opiates to middle-class women as a matter of routine — for menstrual pain, for nerves, for the loosely defined condition known as “the vapours,” which covered everything from anxiety to general unhappiness with one’s circumstances. A paper from 1859 by Charles Meigs, whose text on women’s diseases was one of the most widely used in American medicine, recommended........

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