Hospitals and Health, Published 9 June 2026
We’ve recently been diving into some of the strange and downright dangerous - Victorian-era medical “cures” once sold in colonial Brisbane… and some of them are hard to believe today!
One of the most common remedies was Laudanum, a liquid mix of opium dissolved in alcohol. During the 1800s it could be bought from chemists and general stores across Brisbane and was considered a miracle medicine.
People used it for almost EVERYTHING:
Pain relief
Coughs and colds
Insomnia
Headaches
Diarrhoea
Even calming restless or teething babies!
Yes… babies. Victorian parents were often advised to give small doses as a “quieting syrup” to help infants sleep.
At the time, very little was understood about addiction or the dangers of opium use. Because laudanum was cheap and easy to buy, dependency became widespread and accidental overdoses were tragically common. Old newspapers regularly reported poisonings linked to patent medicines and opiate-based remedies.
It’s fascinating to look back at what was once considered perfectly normal medicine in early Brisbane. Treatments seen as modern and trustworthy in the 1800s would now be considered incredibly dangerous and tightly controlled substances.
The deeper we look into these old remedies, the more they reveal about daily life in colonial Queensland, harsh conditions, limited medical knowledge, and the enormous trust people placed in chemists, travelling salesmen and “miracle cures.”
Have you ever found old medicine bottles, chemist labels or heard family stories about Victorian-era remedies in Queensland? We’d love to hear them!
A note on this visual: To help tell this story, we’ve used computer‑generated illustrations modelled on public‑domain archives. These images are produced strictly for educational, non‑commercial historical sharing.
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