Uses—In the form of syrup and extract, poppy heads are in common use as a sedative. A hot decoction is often externally applied as an anodyne.
In upper India an intoxicating liquor is prepared by heating the capsules of the poppy with jagghery and water.[185]
OPIUM.
Botanical Origin—Papaver somniferum L., [see preceding article].
History[186]—The medicinal properties of the milky juice of the poppy have been known from a remote period. Theophrastus who lived in the beginning of the 3rd century b.c. was acquainted with the substance in question, under the name of Μηκώνιον. The investigations of Unger (1857; see Capsulæ Papaveris,) have failed to trace any acquaintance of ancient Egypt with opium.
Scribonius Largus in his Compositiones Medicamentorum[187] (circa a.d. 40) notices the method of procuring opium, and points out that the true drug is derived from the capsules, and not from the foliage of the plant.
About the year 77 of the same century, Dioscorides[188] plainly distinguished the juice of the capsules under the name of ὀπός from an extract of the entire plant, μηκώνειον, which he regarded as much less active. He described exactly how the capsules should be incised, the performing of which operation he designated by the verb ὀπίζειν. We may infer from these statements of Dioscorides that the collection of opium was at that early period a branch of industry in Asia Minor. The same authority alludes to the adulteration of the drug with the milky juices of Glaucium and Lactuca, and with gum.
Pliny[189] devotes some space to an account of Opion, of which he describes the medicinal use. The drug is repeatedly mentioned as Lacrima papaveris by Celsus in the 1st century, and more or less particularly by numerous later Latin authors. During the classical period of the Roman Empire as well as in the early middle ages, the only sort of opium known was that of Asia Minor.
The use of the drug was transmitted by the Arabs to the nations of the East, and in the first instance to the Persians. From the Greek word ὀπός, juice, was formed the Arabic word Afyun, which has found its way into many Asiatic languages.[190]
The introduction of opium into India seems to have been connected with the spread of Islamism, and may have been favoured by the Mahommedan prohibition of wine. The earliest mention of it as a production of that country occurs in the travels of Barbosa[191] who visited Calicut on the Malabar coast in 1511. Among the more valuable drugs the prices of which he quotes, opium occupies a prominent place. It was either imported from Aden or Cambay, that from the latter place being the cheaper, yet worth three or four times as much as camphor or benzoin.