Medicines that changed history
This breakthrough drugs made medicine modern
Opium
Throughout whole history of humanity, physicians and scientists were searching for medications capable to overcome pain. Opium has become the first of such effective remedy.
Healers of Ancient China, Ancient India, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome knew about properties of the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy and used it to relieve pain. The first testimony of using opium belongs to a Greek philosopher and scientist Theophrastus (371–287 BC).
However, opium was used not only as a medicine. Since the end of XVIII century, opium was widely used as a stupefying remedy in India and China. The Americans and the British actively supported this custom: opium trade was bringing great income. Therefore, when in the middle of XIX century Chinese government tried to outlaw opium smoking, the British started lobbying for their business by force of weapon — several wars broke out, known as “Opium Wars”.
Meanwhile medicine attempted to create a sedative on basis of opium. In 1804, a German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner (1783–1841) isolated white crystals of alkaloids from opium and called them "morphium" after the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus. The arrival of morphine, especially after invention of syringe by a French surgeon Charles Pravaz (1791–1853) in 1853, has given physicians a strong painkiller. However, it became known soon that there is addiction to it that develops more quickly than to opium. Pharmacologists faced the task to find a sedative, which doesn’t cause addiction and doesn’t depress respiratory centre.
Ironically, efforts to create a non-addictive form of morphine led to the creation — and marketing — of diacetylmorphine by the Bayer Company. Its 1898 brand name: Heroin. By anaesthetic effects it appeared to be much stronger than morphine. Until 1910 heroin could be procured at any pharmacy, but then it was proved no less dreadful narcotic.
Despite this and other missteps, morphine and its progeny form the basis of modern pain management. Opium is a forerunner of all modern narcotic analgesics. In the second half of XX century, promedol, phenadone, tramadol, fentanyl, diprivan, butorphanol and other medicines were synthesized, and also some alkaloids were isolated from opium: antitussive drug codeine and vasodilator papaverine. Most of them are included into official lists of narcotic substances, which can be kept and sold only under strict control.
Smallpox vaccine
For long time smallpox, which is supposed to arise more than 3000 years ago in India and Egypt, has been one of the most terrible diseases the humanity has known. Since XV century, smallpox had been “mowing down” humans — it was a permanent epidemic disease in Europe. In XVIII century, 12–15 million people suffered it annually; among them, more than 25% of adults and 55% of children died. Only in 1980 the World Health Organization officially considered that smallpox was eliminated in all developed countries of the world. This has become possible owing to general vaccination.
The founder of vaccination method is an English physician Edward Jenner (1749–1823). The young doctor had got an idea of inoculation of cowpox while he was talking to a milkmaid, whose hands were covered with rashes. For his question, if she was ill with smallpox, she answered that she couldn’t have it because she had already had cowpox. Indeed, Jenner noticed that during an epidemic there was no milkmaid among his patients. Besides, cowpox proceeds easily and without complications.
Inquisitive doctor was gathering data of cowpox infection of a human for 20 years and finally ventured on an experiment. On May 14th, 1796, he rubbed pus scraped from the cowpox blisters on the hands of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom, into a scratch on the body of 8-year old James Phipps. The boy had a slight indisposition, but it passed in a few days. Did he become immune to smallpox? An experiment was needed again, a very dangerous one at this time: it’s risky for the boy’s health and, perhaps, life. After agonizing doubts Jenner ventures: on June 1st, 1796 he injects smallpox matter to James. If the doctor is wrong with his hypothesis, the boy is going to die. Jenner will no longer be able to live too. The kid didn’t fall ill. New attempts to infect him with smallpox didn’t cause any symptoms of the disease.
After repeating this experiment for 23 times, in 1798 Jenner wrote an article “An inquiry into the causes and effects of … the cow pox”. He called the method “vaccination” by the Latin word “vacca”, which means “cow”.
Jenner’s great discovery has become the beginning of a thorny path for him. Many of scientists haven’t accepted the method. The Royal Society of London has returned his paper with a warning “not to compromise his scientific reputation with such articles”. However, soon the discovery was appreciated. Thus, in 1798 compulsory vaccination was imposed in British army and fleet. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, despite France was at war with Great Britain, ordered to make a medal in honour of Jenner’s discovery, and in 1805 imposed vaccination in France. The first to do this in Russia was Yefrem Mukhin (1766–1850), who vaccinated a boy Anton Petrov in 1801. By the order of the empress Maria Feodorovna the boy got a surname Vaktsinov.
Thanks to Jenner’s discovery, the other vaccinations have become a general norm: against hepatitis B, diphtheria, whooping cough, German measles, polio, tetanus and other infections. In 2007, in USA, the first anticancer vaccine in the world was created — it is to prevent the carcinoma of uterine cervix, which is caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV).