“The advance in every section of chemistry during this century (the 19th), and especially during the latter half of it, has literally been by leaps and bounds. Although practically a creation of our own time, no branch has been more fruitful in result, in suggestion, or in possibility, than that of organic analysis.”
(Sir Thomas E. Thorpe:—“Essays in Historical Chemistry,” 1894.)
Three great achievements characterise the pharmacy of the nineteenth century, namely, the discovery of alkaloids in its early years, of anæsthetics in the middle period, and of synthetic organic products in its later years.
ALKALOIDS.
The alkaloids extracted from vegetables are the ideal quintessences which the alchemical pharmacists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought so eagerly to obtain. Their characteristic property is that they are basic, that is, that definite salts can be formed from them by combination with acids. They all contain nitrogen, and have an alkaline reaction.
Of all the popular vegetable drugs opium was the one more than any other tortured to yield up its essence. The early laudanums and extracts of opium aimed at this result, and preparations, such as the Magisterium Opii of Ludovici of Weimar (born about 1625, and author of “Dissertations on Pharmacy”), were used in the belief that the quintessence had been in some degree secured. Robert Boyle experimented with opium with the object of extracting its essential principle. The process he adopted was first to treat the drug with calcined tartar (salt of tartar), and then extract with spirit of wine. By this means he obtained a solution which would be principally one of morphine.
In 1803 a French manufacturing chemist, working on an idea suggested by Vauquelin, produced a crystallisable salt which was at first supposed to be the active ingredient of opium. Experiments on animals seemed to confirm this opinion, and the salt of opium, or “sel narcotique de Derosne,” was believed to have solved the long-standing problem. The product was described in the “Annales de Chimie” of February, 1804. It was the substance now known as narcotine. Sertürner regarded it as meconate of morphium, a misapprehension which was corrected by Robiquet.
In December, 1804, Seguin, a chemist who had been a demonstrator under Fourcroy, and who subsequently got into trouble with Napoleon’s Government on charges of having enriched himself out of drug supplies to the Republican armies, read a paper to the Institute in which he described a process which would yield morphine. For some unexplained reason that paper was not published until 1814. Meanwhile Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner, a pharmacist of Eimbeck, in Hanover, had been working on Derosne’s salt, and had investigated more accurately than anyone before him the composition of opium. His first report was published in 1806, and in that he announced the discovery of “opium-säure” (opium acid), but in 1816 he named this product “meconic acid,” and explained how it was combined with an alkaline base which he called “Morphium.” He described this as analogous to ammonia, and prepared several salts from it. He came near to losing his life in the course of his experiments as, misled by the comparative harmlessness of Derosne’s salt, he had ventured on dangerous doses of his own product. Consequently he was able to determine very accurately the therapeutics of morphine at the same time that he announced its discovery.
“I flatter myself,” wrote Sertürner in 1816, “that chemists and physicians will find that my observations have explained to a considerable extent the constitution of opium, and that I have enriched chemistry with a new acid (meconic) and with a new alkaline base (morphium), a remarkable substance which shows much analogy with ammonia.”
Sertürner’s discovery excited much interest and emulation, and its importance was fully endorsed when, in 1831, the French Institute awarded to him a prize of 2,000 francs “for having opened the way to important medical discoveries by his isolation of morphine and his exposition of its character.”