I suspect it reminded them of the ancient saying, really
There's a story about the origins of the song in the 1964 Mary Poppins movie, 'A Spoonful of Sugar' by the son of one of the Sherman brothers, that they were trying to come up with the song, and he came in from having his polio vaccine on a lump of sugar, and, BINGO! there was their song.
Okay, they changed it to spoonful....
The concept of 'sugaring the pill', to conceal the taste of bitter medicine, used in a metaphorical sense, can be dated back at least to the seventeenth century (according to the Oxford English Dictionary online).
I do not know whether, throughout the Mary Poppins books, she ever administers medicines thus concealed, but it would have been a strategy surely passed on through generations of less supernatural nannies on how to medicate their charges.
While Sabin's sugarlump may have been the immediate stimulus, I depose that the song itself was at least riffing on subconscious memories of this time-honoured practice/saying.
(It is a relentless historian's habit to be sceptical of neat stories.)
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