Sertürner's isolation of morphine

Opium had been a medicine since ancient times, but around 1800 it was still given as a crude extract whose morphine content varied from one batch to the next, so the same dose could do nothing or cause an overdose. Chemists in Germany and France were looking for the part of the drug that did the work. In 1803 Derosne, working in France, precipitated a "salt of opium" with potassium carbonate but did not point out that it was a new substance.

Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner, born in 1783, had been apprenticed at 16 to a court apothecary in Paderborn. With simple equipment he drew crystals of a sleep-inducing substance out of opium, tried it on rats and stray dogs, and described it in letters to Trommsdorff's Journal der Pharmacie in 1805 and 1806. The substance was a weak base that dissolved in acid. Later, during a bad toothache, he swallowed some himself, and he went on to test doses on himself and three young volunteers.

Sources date the discovery to 1804, 1805 or 1817: Séguin reported an isolation to the Académie des Sciences in 1804 but did not publish it until 1814, Sertürner gave the first clear published account in 1805, and his 1817 paper, which called the substance morphium, was the first to draw wide attention.

That 1817 paper won the notice of the French chemist J. L. Gay-Lussac, and the University of Jena gave Sertürner an honorary doctorate the same year. His plant base contradicted the belief that the active parts of medicinal plants were acids. In 1818 W. Meissner coined the word alkaloid for such bases, and codeine, quinine, strychnine and emetine were isolated over the following years. The Institut de France awarded Sertürner its Montyon Prize in 1831.

For its first decades morphine was swallowed. The hypodermic syringe that allowed it to be injected arrived almost 50 years after Sertürner's first report.