If overdose of opium tincture is suspected, rapid professional intervention is required. The primary concern is re-establishing a viable airway and institution of assisted or controlled ventilation if the patient is unable to breathe on their own. Other supportive measures such as the use of vasopressors and oxygen may be indicated to treat cardiac and/or pulmonary failure. Cardiac arrhythmias or arrest will require advanced life-saving measures. Intravenous naloxone or nalmefene, quick-acting opioid antagonists, are the first-line treatment to reverse respiratory depression caused by an overdose of opium tincture. Gastric lavage may be of some use in certain cases. In fiction
In Mary Shelleys novel Frankenstein (1818), Victor Frankenstein takes laudanum as his only means of sleeping and thus preserving his life while in recovery from months of fever and a series of horrible events. In Charles Dickenss novel Oliver Twist (1837), Nancy gave William "Bill" Sikes laudanum to keep him asleep while she ran away to meet Rose Maylie. In Uncle Toms Cabin (1852), an anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, an enslaved woman named Cassy talks about how she killed her newborn by laudanum overdose to spare him from experiencing the horrors of slavery. In the novel Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (1861), Silas finds and adopts a two-year old girl who had wandered into his house. The girl had been abandoned while walking with her opium-addicted mother, Molly Farren, who had fallen asleep in the snow and died.
In the eighteenth century several physicians published work about it, including John Jones, who wrote The Mysteries of Opium Revealed (1700), which was described by one commentator as "extraordinary and perfectly unintelligible." The Scottish physician John Brown, creator of the Brunonian system of medicine, recommended opium for what he termed asthenic conditions, but his system was discredited by the time of his death. The most influential work was by  George Young, who published a comprehensive medical text entitled Treatise on Opium (1753). Young, an Edinburgh surgeon and physician, wrote this to counter an essay on opium by his contemporary Charles Alston, professor of botany and materia medica at Edinburgh who had recommended the use of opium for a wide variety of conditions. Young countered this  by emphasising the risks ...that I may prevent such mischief as I can, I here give it as my sincere opinion... that opium is a poison by which great numbers are daily destroyed. Young gives a comprehensive account of the indications for the drug including its complications. He is critical about writers whose knowledge of the drug is based on chemical or animal experiments rather than clinical practice. The treatise is a detailed, balanced and valuable guide to prevailing knowledge and practice. As it gained popularity, opium, and after 1820, morphine, was mixed with a wide variety of agents, drugs and chemicals including mercury, hashish, cayenne pepper, ether, chloroform, belladonna, whiskey, wine and brandy.