Alexander Wood's hypodermic syringe

Morphine had been isolated early in the century, but for almost 50 years it was taken by mouth. Doctors who wanted to put a drug straight into the body had only large, crude needles attached to tubing.

Alexander Wood, a physician's son born in Fife in 1817, took his MD at Edinburgh in 1839, practised in the New Town, worked as physician to the Stockbridge and Royal Public dispensaries, and lectured at the city's extramural medical school. Stirred by James Young Simpson's experiments with anesthesia, he looked for a way to relieve pain in one spot. In 1853 he used a syringe with a fine hollow needle to inject morphine, dissolved in sherry, into the painful area of an 80-year-old woman with neuralgia.

That same year Charles Gabriel Pravaz, a French surgeon who had never been in contact with Wood, reported a similar instrument, and he died soon afterward. Wood described his method in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal in 1855. With the needle fixed to the syringe, doctors could now give smaller doses and measure them, and Wood's glass syringe with a plunger became popular in Britain; the University of Edinburgh notes that medical needles still follow the same design.

Years passed before the risk of infection from injections was understood and sterilization came into use. Wood was president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from 1858 to 1861, after six years as its secretary, attacked homeopathy in print, and campaigned for sanitary reform and the registration of births. He died on 26 February 1884.