Opium use was huge in the 19th Century British Empire, and was typically smoked out of a large pipe. But my question is about Morphine. The most potent alkaloid of the opium poppy plant.
Morphine was extracted from the Poppy Flower sometime between 1805 and 1816 by Friedrich Wilhelm Serturner. He did multiple experiments with the drug on dogs, but they had all died. He then used it on himself and a few boys, and learned that it was a much better pain killer than Opium, and it offered quite a few recreational effects. It was sold legally over the counter for anything from a cold to menstrual cramps.
I've read a lot about the use of laudanum as a painkiller. Which was an opium tincture containing 1% Morphine. But it was discovered and sold long before Morphine was successfully extracted from opium.
So my question is: Before the advent of the hypodermic needle and syringe, which wasn't invented until around 1850. What route of administration was used in order to get Morphine into the body(Snorting, smoking, drinking, enema, etc.)?
Bonus question if you would be so inclined as to answer it: How common was the use of morphine in early 19th century(1820-1839) Europe(particularly in London)?
(Rereading this, I imagine everyone yelling at me for going pretty much straight into talking about opium, which OP said they’re not interested in)
The relationship between humans and the molecule we now know as morphine is a definitely a longterm one and as all of those, it had lots of periods of high affection as well as times when it was accused of treachery and of being of low moral standing. For most of our journey together with morphine, we ingested it in preparations directly tied to it’s main source, the opium poppy (Papaver Somniferum). “Opium” is what we call the tears of the poppy after an incision has been made, as pictured here
Doesn’t it look sad and in pain? Well that blood or tears, the opium, is about one tenth morphine, which makes it the most important substance in it in regards to it’s physiological effects (in the second place would probably stand other alkaloids codeine or thebaine, if we’re talking about medical use). Why would one want to use it? One, it’s an analgesic, it dulls pain extremely well. But not only physical pain - it works against anxiety, too. If your problem is cough, you’d be hard pressed to find a better suppressant. It works wonders on slowing the processes in the enteric system as well, thus being great against diarrhoea, which in many situation, places and times, can be a life saver. If our body was a computer, wherever morphine goes it’d put 0 instead of 1. So this suffering plant gives us something that greatly reduces pain, has pleasurable psychological effects and binds to receptors all over our nervous system. Gee, I wonder if it could be slightly addictive?
But let’s skip that pesky problem and get to some actual history. The earliest records of opium use stretch pretty much as far we can reach, to Sumeria and later to Egypt. Greeks would use substance called “mekonium”, which were chopped up poppy capsules in water. This gets us to the by far the most common way of getting morphine into your system throughout the ages - ingesting it orally. If you add wine to mekonium or use wine instead of water altogether (you know, besides the wine already in wine...eh, thanks brain), you get what was later called “vinum opii” or “wine of opium”. The opiate alkaloids are greatly soluble in ethanol, which also does happen to have inhibitory effects in our body, making the combination of alcohol and opium seemingly ideal for the purposes it was sought after.
This gets us to laudanum, the tincture (an alcoholic extract) of opium. The name for it comes from the latin word “laudare” which translates to (I hope) “to praise”. The famed Swiss-German physican Paracelsus was highly fond of it. Drinking laudanum is probably the second most common way humans managed to get morphine in them before it was isolated. Actually, it was extremely popular many years after that extraction.
We will get back to laudaunum shortly, I want to stop by Friedrich Sertürner’s place on our road there. You are right to point out some discrepancies in the exact timing of his great discovery. The actual extraction of crystalline substance, which he called “morphine” and attributed to it the sleep-inducing effects of Papaver Somniferum, happened sometime around 1803 to 1804, when Sertürner was barely a twenty year old pharmacist’s assistant in Germany. As such, his writings and experiments took some time to gain notoriety. He wasn’t the only one interested in this specific plant and trying to extract the main active component of it - Armand Seguin in France described his attempts at doing exactly this in 1804 before the Institut de France. However, his work 'Sur l'opium’ was not published until 1814. To return to Sertürner, at first he tried the substance on some animals, which did not come out of that trial alive. Oh, history of science, I love you, but I wish you didn’t kill so many dogs. Then he ingested morphine himself along with some other human subjects. I am less surprised by this sequence of events the more I read about 19th century pharmacological research (look up Max von Pettenkofer or the fate of Walter Reed’s yellow fever research team on Cuba, to see what I mean). Sertürner confirmed the analgesic effects of his isolated alkaloid and started a true revolution in organic chemistry. In the 19th century, many alkaloids extracted from plant matter would follow, such as caffeine from coffee and others. Morphine itself starts to be used more widely after 1815.
So, laudanum and also something resembling an answer to your question about England and morphine use (I do indeed want to get to answering things you are actually interested in, sometime before Christmas). If you mix laudanum with camphor, glycerin, and anise, you get something called “paregoric”, which was highly popular as a medicinal preparation and used extensively in the care for children. We’ve already agreed with Paracelsus in praising laudanum for it’s use against pain and a baby that’s teething will let you know that he or she is indeed in great pain. Soothing syrups such as Godfrey's Cordial, Dalby's Carminative, Daffy's Elixir, Atkinson's Infants' Preservative, Mrs Winslow's Soothing Syrup were popular. Here’s a lovely ad for the last one, from U.S. :
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gMcC3d73Gzo/T9-8JqRJdYI/AAAAAAAAEFY/n3HS17OS25Y/s1600/SCAN0854+copy.jpg
The problem (and it was a problem because of the addictive properties of opium and withdrawal effects) was that mothers were using these things to generally calm a fussy kid down as well as helping themselves to some laudanum for their personal use. Laudanum was cheaper than many other ways to introduce alcohol into the system and, hey, it’s a soothing medicine, what can be the harm? The 1868 Pharmacy Act in the UK put restrictions on selling of pharmacologic agents and helped to somewhat alleviate the damage of widespread opiate use amongst the working classes (some of which is misattributed and was due to bad living conditions, i.e. many child deaths).
But what about the damn morphine by itself!? Well, before and after the invention and widespread use of the hypodermic needle, it was powdered and applied topically on the place where you desired the analgesia. As you can imagine, a war is a time of great need of painkillers and the Civil War in U.S. happened just about as the injecting of morphine (of anything, really) was taking off. A year after the end of the war,in 1866, the famous surgeon Samuel D. Gross writes:
“The endermic application of morphia has been found highly beneficial in neuralgia, chiefly, however, in mitigating pain. It may…be sprinkled upon a blistered surface, be inoculated, or, what I greatly prefer, be injected subcutaneously. The operation…is executed with a small syringe, having a very slender nozzle, which is inserted into a small puncture preciously made in the skin of the affected parts, the subcutaneous cellular tissue being torn up with a common probe to make room for the reception of a drachm of solution of morphia”
So even then, hypodermic needle was not as well as established as we might imagine. There also weren’t as many needles to go around. The Union distributed some 2000 syringes to about 11,000 surgeons and many of them might have been reluctant to use it anyways, or simply in a hurry, as you would have to puncture the skin first with a lancet and then administer the drug via needle. You’d need the lancet because the needle was often blunt. Besides morphine, opium would have been used as well, either in the form of tincture or pills. Making a pill would entail powdering the desired substance, combining it with a binding agent, rolling it out, cutting up into pieces and then forming little spheres.The Union Army distributed about ten million opium pills during the war. Outside the war, if you went into a pharmacy, you could buy powders, such as Dover's powder, which included morphine as one of the ingredients and was used to treat cold and fever.
In closing, for the most part in history, the many ways of ingesting opium was certainly the way to get morphine into your body and this did not stop after morphine was discovered as the main active substance of it. . After it was isolated, it took time to go from powder and (possibly) pill usage to be superseeded by morphine injections. I’ve not spoken about smoking, as it is the way to take opium and I will sit on my hypocritical throne and look down upon anyone who will point out how much I babbled about opium in the answer.
Now I feel basically naked in front of the jury of much better experts and I hereby present my witnesses and accomplices that helped me to write this (so, further reading and sources):
Books
Opium and the People: Opiate Use and Drug Control Policy in Nineteenth Century England by Virginia Berridge & Griffith Edwards (1987)
Civil War Pharmacy: A History of Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy by Michael A. Flannery (2004)
Pharmako/Poeia, Revised and Updated: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft by Dale Pendell (2010)
Articles:
The Army Disease: Drug Addiction and the Civil War by Jonathan Lewy published in War in History 21(1):102-119 · January 2014
Chasing the Dragon: The Cultural Metamorphosis of Opium in the United States, 1825‐1935 by Marcus Aurin published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14(3):414 - 441 · September 2000
If you've suffered long enough and read up to here, here's a nice song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBrctD45T2M
