Learn the story of how morphine was invented

Morphine is now over 200 years old, but to this day it is still one of the most commonly used painkillers in medicine. Derived from opium, the substance is mainly used to relieve pain in patients with chronic pain, advanced stages of disease or in the postoperative period.

But don't think it was easy to figure out the morphine. It entered history from the individual efforts of a very curious young man, German Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner (1783 - 1841). An apothecary apprentice, he began to wonder about the properties of opium when he was about 20 years old in the town of Einbeck.

Why the opium?

Extracted from poppy, popular name of Papaver Somniferum, opium has been used by mankind for millennia. The plant had been cultivated by the Sumerians for 5, 000 years and there are records of the medicinal use of the drug in ancient Greece. In Sertürner's time, the drug was the main painkiller used by doctors, but practitioners complained about the unpredictable effects of the substance, mainly because it was difficult to dose the amount to be administered in each case.

To solve this problem, the young German decided that it was necessary to isolate the active ingredient from opium. Thus, it would be easier to define the amount of analgesic that should be taken by each patient.

In honor of the God of Sleep

From 1803, the apprentice devoted himself to the task in his spare time and made a series of experiments with the chief's old equipment. Eventually, he was able to isolate a half yellowish crystal, which was actually an alkaloid.

After some animal testing (and the death of some dogs), Sertürner began adjusting the dosage of the drug. All of his experiments were published in a scientific journal in 1806. He named his invention morphium, named after the Greek sleeping god, Morpheus. A few years later, in France, the substance gained the universal name of morphine.

As the young man was not known to the scientific community of the time and was a mere apprentice, his discovery went unnoticed for a few years. In this period, he left the work aside, until he decided to test the product itself when suffering a severe toothache. Then, to make sure the substance could be used by humans, he used some children as guinea pigs.

Fortunately, the tests went well, and over time chemists and doctors began to pay attention to the discovery. It began to be widely used from 1815. But do not think that morphine has no negative effects. In addition to being highly addictive, the substance can cause nausea and constipation. Sertürner himself acknowledged that the drug was harmful.

Today, even with the emergence of other painkillers, morphine is still a widely used and controlled substance. Sertürner's crystallization of the substance was the first successful attempt to isolate a natural acaloid from a plant and led to several other experiments that helped build the current pharmaceutical industry.