Morphine • God's Own Medicine

Today I'd like to give you a brief history of a notorious substance: morphine. Being the gold standard for pain relief, morphine is used on a daily basis by tons of patients and since its inception in 1807, it has traveled a rather interesting path.

God's own medicine

Morphine, feted as “God’s own medicine” by Sir William Osler and named after the Greek God of dreams, Morpheus, has been around since ancient times. First extracted from opium in 1806 by the German pharmacist Friedrich Willhelm Sertürner, who perfected his extraction procedure for years to come to eventually obtain pure morphium in 1817. Sertürner studied the pharmacological properties of his discovery using himself and stray dogs as test subjects, reporting both the benefits and side effects of morphine in two comprehensive papers. In one of these publications, he described observations made with morphine in humans and for the first time termed it morphium. It is this scientific break-through that also earned him a doctoral degree from the university of Jena in 1817.

War and morphine

Although being extremely effective at alleviating pain via oral intake, its use increased tremendously when the Scottish physician Alexander Wood invented the first true hypodermic syringe in 1853. During the American Civil War, the Seven Weeks’ War and the Franco-Prussian War soldiers were given morphine for almost every ailment under the sun which led to the dangers of addiction and overdose. Things got so out of control that some hospitals even had to hire armed men to guard medicine supplies in order to keep addicts from stealing!

Heroin

Being such a double-edged sword, pharmaceutical companies started to look for non-addictive alternatives. It was not until 1898 when Heinrich Dreser, head of pharmacology at Bayer & Co, marketed heroin that they thought they’d finally succeeded. As soon as heroin hit the market, Bayer & Co’s revenue growth skyrocketed. Massive amounts were sold daily and the opiate market flourished. This, however, came at a heavy cost. The first cases of heroin addiction started to pop up and researchers at Bayer & Co knew something was terribly wrong. It turned out that repeated oral administration of heroin resulted in the development of tolerance, eventually leading to both physical and mental addiction. This led to strict regulations in terms of production, distribution and consumption of heroin in 1925. However, the underworld had already recognised the shortage and value of heroin and started to illicitly produce and traffic the substance...and keeps on doing so ever since.