Mississippi Jack route to New Orleans. Jacky begins to market her own patent medicine consisting of an alcoholic tincture of opium (better known as laudanum) and Kentucky bourbon, which she markets during medicine shows. Most patent medicines of the time were made up with similar ingredients and similar lavish claims for their efficacy. Use of these compounds was widespread and unregulated. The crew encounter a secret abolitionist running a slave-selling scam in which the "slave" is sold, and then escapes to be sold again and again. Similar plots were sometimes used to trick runaways into cooperating with a sale which would turn
Laudanum imaginable: mercury, hashish, cayenne pepper, ether, chloroform, belladonna, whiskey, wine and brandy." As one researcher has noted: "To understand the popularity of a medicine that eased -- even if only temporarily -- coughing, diarrhoea and pain, one only has to consider the living conditions at the time". In the 1850s, "cholera and dysentery regularly ripped through communities, its victims often dying from debilitating diarrhoea", and dropsy, consumption, ague and rheumatism were all too common. By the 19th century, laudanum was used in many patent medicines to "relieve pain ... to produce sleep ... to allay irritation ... to check excessive