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Tuesday 15 August 2017

Fatal Overdose



Fatal Overdose
  
O’Brien Street, a somewhat forgotten corner of Adelaide was the home to a family tragedy that could have easily been prevented.
The Thulborne family lived a happy existence in their corner of the city. George Thulborne worked for the Adelaide Corporation as a carter, and his wife, Mary was a stay at home mother of ten children.
On the morning of Tuesday the 27th of August 1912, George set off for work, and Mary woke the children, readying them for school. Some of the children had been a little ill, so Mary pulled down an old bottle of medicine from a high shelf, with the intention of taking it to the local chemist on Sturt Street to have it tested.
 Trusting her memory of what was in the concoction, she left the bottle on the table in the dining room and headed off to the chemist.
In the meantime, her two-year-old son, Maurice, who had been playing outside, came back inside, saw the bottle, and drank from it. Mary returned home not long after but did not notice a small amount of the contents of the bottle had disappeared.
 Within a couple of hours, Maurice was complaining of stomach pains, and by mid-afternoon he had become unconscious.
 Dr MacDonald was called, who did everything he could think of to try and work out was wrong with the toddler, and how to save him, but unfortunately by 9:45 pm that evening, young Maurice Alfred Thulborne had died.

The concoction Maurice had drunk from consisted of a mixture of Oil of Aniseed, Peppermint Oil, Laudanum and Paregoric. A mixture that would have smelt appealing to a two-year child, but was actually a toxic mixture of alcohol and opium.
 Laudanum was a popular remedy in Victorian times, which contained around ten percent powdered opium. In its mixture is several opioids, including morphine and codeine.
 Paregoric was also a Victorian era medicine, which contained
"honey, liquorice, flowers of Benjamin, and opium, camphor, oil of aniseed, salt of tartar and spirit of wine," and was used as a household remedy to treat, amongst other things, diarrhea coughs and pain in children from teething[1].

Maurice Alfred Thulborne was buried in the Catholic section of the West Terrace Cemetery.


[1] Boyd, EM & MacLauchlan, ML, 1944, The Expectorant Action of Paregoric, Canadian Medical Association Journal, April 1944, Vol. 50, page 344

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