The Death Rate Was Up. The Health Officer Blamed the Syringe.
In 1891 Olympia's health officer reported an unprecedented mortality spike—and pointed to morphine and cocaine injections, with young women said to be using them 'just for fun.'
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The report of Dr. Riley, the health officer, shows that thirty-six deaths have occurred in this city for the nine months ending September 30. But for the past 60 days, says the doctor, the death rate has been unparallelled and out of all proportion to the amount of sickness. This, too, is rendered more remarkable from the fact that no epidemic of contagious disease is prevalent. There are but eight cases of typhoid fever present, and I have seen the time when there were as many as 120 cases with the population not nearly so large, and no deaths resulted. Even at the present time the city is in a healthier condition than I have ever known it before, and the increased death rate cannot be attributed to the upturning of so much earth, as may be supposed, but to the continued and excessive rainfall during the summer months, which created so much vegetable matter causing decomposition.
“Another thing to which the increased death rate may be attributed,” said Dr. Riley, “is the indiscriminate use of hypodermic injections of morphine and cocaine. This is an evil not only among physicians but particularly among people who have no knowledge of the injuries they are doing themselves. No matter what their ailment is, the first thing they do is to jab themselves with the syringe. You can see young men and young women walking our streets today, whose mental faculties are just blunted with the stupor occasioned by its use.
“It has not been an hour since, in conversation with a gentleman who lives not many blocks from the Olympia Hotel, he related a scene he had just witnessed. While sitting at his window he unconsciously observed what was going on in the house opposite. There stood the young ladies of the family with their arms bared, each receiving in turn an injection of the drug, enjoying the sensation immensely. Were that the end of it, the result would not be so serious, but they gradually grow slaves to the practice until they are unable to do without it. There has been more morphine sold in the last three years than any other drug.”
“There stood the young ladies of the family with their arms bared, each receiving in turn an injection of the drug, enjoying the sensation immensely.”
A city health officer linking deaths to injection drug use reads uncannily like today's opioid-overdose reports. Then as now, public health officials struggled to explain mortality that did not fit the usual epidemic categories, and the story shows how quickly a medical tool became a street habit.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.