Discovery of morphine by Friedrich Sertürner

The use of a wide of variety of opium alkaloids, obtained from the dried sap of Papaver somniferum, has been reported ins several cultures. The potential of opium was known and used in ancient Greece, Rome as well as Arab cultures.

Morphine, which is the benzylisoquinoline alkaloid, occurs in significant amounts in opium.

Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner (1783-1855) was a German pharmacist who discovered and isolated morphine from opium in 1804. He named the compound morphine, after Morpheus, the Greek god of dream.

Morhium or morphine is generally accepted as being the first medicinal alkaloid isolated from any plant.

The achievement was the most important ‘quantum leap’ in the history of pharmacology and represents the beginning of the true chemical investigation of plants.

Joseph Caventou (1795-1877) and Pierre Pelletier (1788-1842) were French pharmacist who applied the methods of Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner and were among the first to isolate a number of extremely toxic, yet medicinally important alkaloids  including emetine in 1817, strychnine in 1818, quinine 1820 and veratrine in 1821.

With the invention of the hypodermic needle in 1853, morphine’s use became widespread. Decades alter, heroin was synthesized by Dresser by diacetylating morphine.
Discovery of morphine by Friedrich Sertürner

History of morphine

Morphine is one of the principle ingredients of opium. It is one of the most powerful natural pain relievers known and has become the standard against which other opiates, natural and synthetic are judged. Morphine and opium belong to a larger family of drugs named the opiates, which are known for producing a wide range of effects from sedation to constipation.

Opium was used sparingly in Europe during the middle ages, but its popularity increased during the Renaissance. By the dawn of the 19th century, opium addiction was a major problem.

The most of the earlier references to the poppy plant and opium from Sumerian, Greece, Roman, and Arab texts indicate that people were keenly aware of the therapeutic benefits of this drug early in history.

The Sumerian used the words hul, meaning ‘joy’ and gil meaning ‘plant’, when referring to the poppy plant.

In early 1850s, Alexander Wood, a Scottish physician, reasoned that the best way to relieve painful extremity injuries would be to inject morphine directly into the nerves that supplied the painful area.

In 1804, Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner (1783-1841) isolated morphine from raw opium and his classic paper published in 1817. He chose the name morphine for Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.

After he tested the extract on dogs, Sertürner used himself as a guinea pig, and almost died in the process.

The drug quickly became a legal analgesic that most were able to use safely. It was only after the later introduction of the hypodermic needle, which made intravenous injections possible, that morphine became commonly associated with abuse and addiction.
History of morphine

History of Opium

Alcohol may have been the most frequently consumed drug history, but the most effective medicinal drug available before the dawn of the twentieth century was opium obtained from the poppy, Papaver somniferum L. – one of the oldest cultivated species known.

The use of opium dates back further than written history.

The first people known to have used opium are the Sumerians who lived in lower Mesopotamia, now western Iraq, in 3500 BC. The Sumerians are best remembers as the culture that invented writing.

The Sumerian used opium medicinally. Some historians contend that opium was not used recreationally.

By 1300 BC the Egyptians were cultivating poppies for the production of opium. The opium they produced was an extremely popular commodity. They traded it as far away as Greece and central Europe.

The Egyptians listed opium along with approximately 700 other medicinal compounds in the famous Ebers Papyrus.

Claims that opium was used in the Neolithic period should be viewed with extreme caution.

They are based in the finding of seeds of the closely related P. somniferum subsp. Setigerum in Germany at the Danubian settlements, the location of the first central European farms around 4400 – 4000 BC.

Much greater quantities of poppy seeds have been found in northern France and farming settlements on the shores of lakes in Switzerland and surrounding areas, which date back to 3700 – 3625 BC.

Both P. somniferum and its species setigerum produce morphine and related narcotic compounds, though the former generates greater amount.

However, the seeds of both plants contain insufficient amounts of active alkaloids to produce any narcotic effect.

The seeds from the Neolithic period were probably used for the production of oil, as they certainly were in later times.

The first mention of opium by the Greeks was made around 330 BC by Hippocrates the father of medicine, about opium’s usefulness in curing a number of diseases, especially diarrhea.

A small portion of the current opium crop (possibly 5%) is used for pharmaceutical medicines; most opium is destined for the illegal drug trade, but the nonmedical.

Opium was always the most essential in both Eastern and Western medical prescriptions until the US government began strictly enforcing its worldwide prohibition during the 1940s.

By then approximately eighty percent of all medications sold in America and Europe contained some form of opium or opium derivative.
History of Opium

History of Anesthesiology

History of Anesthesiology
Anesthesiology is a knowledge or study how to have a condition of having sensation blocked. Other definition is “reversible lack of awareness”. This will allow patients to undergo surgery and procedures without feel pain.

In ancient Incas, shaman coked up chewed coca leaves and drilled holes in the heads of their patients while splitting into the wounds they’d inflicted.

Dated in 4200 BC, Sumerian people used opium poppies as herbal remedy. Opium then was introduced to China in 330 BC and India in 600 BC.

Assyrian and Egyptian physicians obtained artificial sleep for their patient by quickly compressing the Carotid vessels of their neck. This practice was followed as well by the Greek physicians. Arab translation of the Greek medicine helped to make Islamic physicians supreme in the middle ages.

Abulcasis and Avicenna wrote about anesthesia in their book: Al-Tasrif and The Canon of Medicine. Baghdad at that time became the world’s leading medical and drug center. With the skill of the Arab Alchemists, the art of drug making began to evolve into the science of Pharmacology. Western physicians emerging from the Middle Ages found the Arab pharmacopoeia, in which a list of medicinal plants composed the anesthetic armamentarium.

British Chemist Humphry Davy in 1799 discovered a nitrous oxide or a laughing gas that have anesthetic quality. The discovery was ignored until Connecticut dentist Horace Wells began to experiment using nitrous oxide as an anesthetic during tooth surgery.

In 1846, dentist, William Thomas Green Morton performed the first public demonstration of diethyl ether (then called sulfuric ether) as an anesthetic agent, for a patient undergoing an excision of a vascular tumor from his neck. Chloroform was introduced as a surgical anesthetic by Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson in 1847. Although it can eased pain of labor, chloroform had higher risks than those associated with ether.

The first effective local anesthetic was cocaine. Isolated in 1859, it was first used by Carl Koller, at the suggestion of Sigmund Freud, in ophthalmic surgery in 1884.

Chemical substance that has a morphine-like action, Opioids was first used by Racoviceanu-Piteşti, who reported his work in 1901.
History of Anesthesiology