Happy Birthday Morphine

The 200th Birthday of Morphine
By LiveScience Staff

posted: 20 May 2005
07:19 am ET



Morphine was born 200 years ago in the small lab of an obscure, uneducated pharmacist's assistant. Today, more than 230 tons of the painkiller are used every year.

In 1805 at the age of 21, Freidrich Wilhelm Adam Serturner (1783-1841), experimented with the opium poppy in his spare time. He isolated a compound that had ten times the power of processed opium. He called it morphine, after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, for its tendency to cause sleep.

The discovery is being celebrated on May 21.

Serturner spent years experimenting with the morphine -- often on himself, according to a recounting of the history by the University of Chicago. At first, the discovery was not widely recognized. But eventually it caught on.

A brief history:

In 1818, French physician Francois Magendie published a paper that described how morphine brought pain relief and much-needed sleep to an ailing young girl. This stimulated widespread medical interest.
By the mid-1820s morphine was widely available in Western Europe in standardized doses from several sources, including the Darmstadt chemical company started by Heinrich Emanuel Merck.
In 1831, Serturner won a lucrative prize for the discovery.
By the 1850s the first reliable syringes were developed and injected morphine became a standard method of reducing pain during and after surgery.
By the 1870s physicians had become increasingly aware of morphine's addictive properties.
Morphine research led to the development of heroin, promoted by Bayer Laboratories in 1898 as an analgesic and a "sedative for coughs." in 1898. It was named for its "heroic" ability to relieve pain. Production was halted in 1913, by which time Bayer was selling a new blockbuster called aspirin.
Although many other types of pain relievers have been synthesized since Serturner's discovery, "morphine remains the standard against which all new medications for postoperative pain relief are compared," says Jonathan Moss, a professor of anesthesia and critical care at the University of Chicago.

 

Mellow on morphine, he smiles and floats
above the stretcher over which I hover.
I snip an annular ligament
and his foot plops unnoticed into the pail,
superfluous as a placenta after labor has ended.
His day was just starting when his hootch disappeared,
along with the foot and at least one friend.
Absently I brush his face,
inspecting, investigating,
validating data gathered by sight and intuition,
willing physical contact to fetter soul to earth.


Too late my heart dodges and weaves, evades the inevitable.
Ambushed again.
Damn, I'm in love.
Bonded forever by professional intimacies,
unwitting disclosures offered and accepted,
fulfilling a covenant sealed in our chromosomes,
an encounter ephemeral as fireflies on a hot Georgia night
in a place and time too terrible to be real.
But it will shoot flaming tracers through all my dreams
until the time my soul, too, floats unfettered.

When daylight waxes and morphine wanes,
when pain crowds his brain
and phantasms of his footless future bleach the bones of present
our moment together will fade as a fever dream
misty, gossamer, melting from make-believe
through might-have-been
past probably-didn't
all the way into never happen, man--
as I move on to the next stretcher
and the next fleeting lover--

 

Wow- where'd you get something so sickeningly profound?

 

from a tired nurse long ago in a land far away that some don't talk of and others don't believe of. Her name is Dusty and she seen things that some never had nightmares of and she let good men go with a smile on their face by letting go of their hand. She was the last day and the last one and was the only thing good to some and the worst fears of others. To a few, she was the first white woman that ever touched them, to many , she was the last women they ever seen. But to all, she was love and made the hurt go away.

She wrote and lived that poem.