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Opium and absinthe5/4/2023 ![]() While I was looking into 1899, I researched all the events that happened that year to get more ideas. This all took place in 1899, so suddenly, I had a date! We were watching the original cast show a lot and I became interested in Kid Blink and the newspaper companies that really squeezed these poor newspaper sellers with their greedy fists. My children love musicals, and one of them became obsessed with Newsies. ![]() In Opium and Absinthe, I considered having a main character with a not-so-hidden morphine habit to give the reader some empathetic insight into the complexities of addiction.Īnother idea came from my home. It’s not exactly the image we conjure up when thinking of needle-wielding opioid addicts. What shocked me during the research process was learning that wealthy women in the late 1800s often used and abused injectable morphine, because the syringe kits were pricey. Morphine was isolated in the early 1800s and the hypodermic needle was invented a few decades later. We covered topics like arsenic, lobotomies, radium, and opiates-all things used throughout history to treat patients but that were very likely going to kill them along the way. In 2017, my nonfiction book Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything (co-written with Nate Pedersen) was published by Workman Publishing. The first idea for Opium and Absinthe was about opium. ![]() One by one, I gathered, until it was time to sew them all together into a book. The creation of each novel has been like stitching together a monster of a story with several vital parts that begged to be included. My recent book, Opium and Absinthe, is the third historical medical mystery I’ve written. I can’t answer that question in a single sentence. Inevitably, all authors get the same question about their book: How on earth did you come up with this idea?
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