Morphine
/ˈmɔːrfiːn/noun
The chief painkilling alkaloid of opium, still the reference standard for severe pain.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of the dream-shaper”
The story of the word
Friedrich Sertürner, an apothecary's assistant in Westphalia, separated the active principle out of opium in the first years of the nineteenth century and named it morphium after Morpheus. Morpheus is built on μορφή, form: in Ovid he is the dream-god who takes the shapes of people and walks through sleepers' minds wearing them. French chemists regularised the name to morphine and English took that spelling. Amorphous, metamorphosis and morphology are the same μορφή.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
They started her on oral morphine and the pain finally let go.
Field hospitals in 1916 ran out of morphine before they ran out of bandages.