Changing Practice and Policy in Medicine and Public Health

Developments in medical practice and knowledge shaped the use of opiates and cocaine as medicine in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Improved vaccines, sanitation, and surgical techniques made opium and cocaine less useful as medicine in the United States and Europe. In most of the rest of the world, these new medical practices were less available, and opiates remained important as medicine. Nevertheless, anti-opium activists criticized what they saw as the continued overuse of opium as medicine.