Morphine addiction was a significant public health issue in late nineteenth-century France. Following the invention of the hypodermic syringe in the 1850s, morphine was prescribed by doctors for everything from headaches and menstrual pain to cancer and palliative care. A proliferation of artworks created in France engaged with this new social concern, and those artworks almost always depicted morphine users as female. Yet statistical studies at the time show that men, particularly those working in the medical sector, made up the majority of habitual users. This talk explores the conspicuous absence of both male figures and medical professionals in the visual culture of morphine addiction; it argues that the medicalisation of morphine in French society implicates the doctor within these artworks, despite his figural absence, and offers a covert criticism of the medical sector that appears only overtly in the form of caricature. An analysis of the material culture of opiate paraphernalia (the hypodermic syringe and the opium pipe) reveals that the medicalisation of morphine also functioned to promote the colonisation of Indochina by France. The French posited morphine as western, modern and in opposition to opium, which was perceived as foreign and regressive.