Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner (; 19 June 1783 – 20 February 1841) was a German pharmacist and a pioneer of alkaloid chemistry. He is best known for his discovery of morphine, which he isolated from opium in 1804, and for conducting tests, including on himself, to evaluate its physiological effects.
Biography
Sertürner was born, the fourth of six children, to Joseph Simon Serdinier and Marie Therese Brockmann on 19 June 1783, in Neuhaus, Holy Roman Empire (now part of Paderborn). The family may have had origins in Sardinia. His father called himself an architectus, serving surveyor and engineer to the prince bishop. After his father died, he became a pharmacist's apprentice at the Cramersche Hofapotheke in Paderborn.
Sertürner worked on the isolation of morphine from opium from 1804. He called the isolated alkaloid "morphium" after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. He published a comprehensive paper on its isolation, crystallization, crystal structure, and pharmacological properties, which he studied first in stray dogs and then in self-experiments. Morphine was not only the first alkaloid to be extracted from opium, but the first ever alkaloid to be isolated from any plant. Thus Sertürner became the first person to isolate the active ingredient associated with a medicinal plant or herb. In 1821 he married Eleonore Dorette von Rettberg of Einbeck and would have six children. In 1822, Sertürner bought the main pharmacy in Hamelin (Rathaus Apotheke), where he worked until his death on 20 February 1841. Around 1831 he was involved in studying a cholera epidemic that affected Hamelin and recognized an organismic cause for the disease. He suffered from arthritis during his last years and it is said that he took morphine for relief. There have been suggestions that he may have become addicted. The autopsy noted that his entire body gave the appearance of dropsy.
As described in his 1817 paper, he finally found success extracting colourless crystals of pure morphine by precipitation. He dissolved the crystals in alcohol and tested the effects of this solution by swallowing it together with 3 boys, “none older than seventeen years.” He administered it gradually, in three doses of half-grains. After the third dose, symptoms of intoxication increased to an almost fatal extent. Concerned by this result, Sertürner drank several ounces of vinegar along with the boys, inducing extreme vomiting. He was not fully conscious while responding to the situation: It was renamed to morphine by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac in 1817.
Heinrich Emanuel Merck began the sale of morphine a few years after Sertürner's paper was published. Jean-Francois Derosne and Armand Séguin have both been claimed to have discovered morphine before Sertürner. In 1831, Sertürner received the Montyon Prize from the Institut de France with the title ‘Benefactor of Humanity’.