Examines how the drinking of laudanum for medical reasons developed and how it became an everyday safeguard against pain, poverty, and boredom. Opium eating was catapulted into fame by the confessions of Thomas De Quincy and insinuated itself into the lives and works of writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Lord Byron, Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats, the Brontsı̐ , Samuel Taylor Coleridge and many others. Illustrated with photographs, engravings, advertisements, movie stills, pulp magazine and dime novel covers and paraphernalia.