Godfrey’s Cordial was as good as advertised at keeping infants asleep. That’s because it contained laudanum, a tincture of opium, in a sweet syrup. An 1857 article in the Brooklyn Evening Star said it could “explain away your charitable wonder that the frequent beggar women who hold out imploring hands, and roll up patient eyes at Broadway stoops, should be blessed with brats of such accommodating sleepy headedness, by showing… that those infantile objects of your admiration are brought up to scratch with laudanum—fuddled continually and permanently stupefied at last.”26
