Profitable Wonders

There are few more uplifting sights than a scattering of corn poppies in an English meadow.

‘All silk and flame like burning coals fallen from heaven’s altar,’ wrote Ruskin. Their red, crumpled petals, transparent like stained glass, are made luminous by the rays of the sun.

More uplifting still, if in a rather different sense, is the mind-enhancing, solace-inducing, white sap of its close relative the opium poppy. Papaver somniferum is the most consequential in its influence on human affairs of any of the tens of thousands of natural chemicals produced by plants.

The recognition of, and admiration for, opium’s narcotic properties stretch back over millennia. But the credit for its popularisation as a near-universal panacea for human suffering – and facilitator of the imaginative sensibility of numerous writers and composers – rests firmly with the 17th-century physician Thomas Sydenham.

Posthumously acknowledged as ‘the English Hippocrates’, Sydenham asserted the primacy of empirical observation over scholastic theorising. He wrote definitive treatises on gout and epidemics. Sydenham was also the first to describe scarlet fever and identify the link between fleas and typhus.

He is best known for formulating a palatable tincture, laudanum (two ounces of opium, a pint of sherry, cinnamon, saffron and cloves). He devised it as a specific antidote for the relief of all manner of painful illnesses, including the debilitating diarrhoea of cholera and the remorseless cough of pulmonary afflictions.

‘I cannot but break out in praise of God, the giver of all good things,’ he wrote, ‘for gifting the human race with a medicine of the value of opium.’

Laudanum proved indispensable most especially for those enfeebled by tuberculosis, the ‘captain of the armies of death’. So often, in its later stages, TB spreads to the throat, causing excruciating pain on swallowing and rendering speech impossible. Laudanum alone could mitigate the misery of consumption’s pale and wasted victims as they died.

For more than 150 years, Sydenham’s laudanum was the sole, reliable, effective remedy doctors could prescribe.

Meanwhile, its more generally euphoriant properties offered a welcome solace for the anxious and depressed. It conferred, as one advocate described it, ‘an extraordinary Refreshment of the Spirit as upon hearing good news or any other cause of joy’.

Laudanum’s visionary qualities famously conjured up strange and wonderful imagery in creative minds. Keats’s poetry is redolent with the drug, as is Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, of course. For De Quincey, ‘an abyss of divine enjoyment suddenly revealed’ itself. Hector Berlioz composed the March to the Scaffold of his Symphonie Fantastique in a laudanum-induced reverie. The 19th-century feminist sociologist Harriet Martineau recalled being told by a wellconnected literary acquaintance, ‘There is no author (or authoress) who does not indulge the habit of taking a stimulant such as laudanum.’

The opium poppy would also be instrumental in the most significant chemical discovery of the 19th century: the isolation of a drug in its pure form from a natural product.

In 1817, Friedrich Serturner, a German apothecary without any academic training, mixed an extract of opium with water. He added sodium chlorate, precipitating out its active ingredient, morphine, which proved to be ten times more potent.

This would be a seminal event in the history of pharmacology. Over the next 50 years, chemists, deploying similar methods of extraction, would isolate dozens of pure active ingredients of medicinal value from plants. Among them were the anaesthetics cocaine and tubocurarine, digoxin and quinidine (for heart disorders), the bronchodilator ephedrine, atropine and physostigmine (for neurological conditions).

Morphine, being so vastly more potent, rapidly displaced Sydenham’s laudanum. In probably the poppy’s greatest contribution to mankind, morphine would, like a ministering angel, alleviate the pain and suffering of millions of casualties of terrifying conflicts over the next 200 years.

Yet, for all opium’s immense influence on human affairs, the good conferred and harm for those addicted to its seductive charms, almost everything about it is surrounded in mystery.

Alone of all flowers, the poppy secretes a sap from the interior of its seedpod. The sap serves no purpose, either for the poppy‘s survival (by deterring predators) or for its propagation.

The reactions by which the sap acquires its narcotic properties defy chemical analysis. The reason it needs to be exposed, by the slit of the opiumgatherer’s knife, to the oxidising effects of air in order to acquire its potency remain unknown.

Put another way, the poppy requires the intervention of humans for its opium-secreting seedpod to realise its manifold possibilities.

A divine gift, one might almost think.