The Magic of Morphine

From: humantouchofchemistry.com

Morphine is a drug that is used as an anaesthetic. It is derived from opium and it affects the central nervous system relieving pain.

The discovery of morphine:
The origins of morphine can be traced back to 1522 when the scientist and alchemist Paracelsus is said to have used laudanum, as a pain killer. He advised that this should be used sparingly. The popularity of laudanum increased with the East India Company’s interest in opium trade in 1757. In 1804 the German scientist Friedrich Sertürner identified morphine as an alkaloid extracted from the poppy plant. 13 years later morphine was marketed as a drug to cure alcohol and opium addiction. It was only later that they realised that morphine could be equally addictive. The drug was extensively used during the American Civil War.

The discovery of the hypodermic needle:
An important factor in the adoption of morphine as a pain killer was the invention of the hypodermic needle in 1853. French surgeon Charles Pravaz and Scottish physician Alexander Wood independently invented the hypodermic needle. Wood had a patient who was suffering from neuralgia which was a sharp pain in the nerves. Using the device he was able to administer morphine to ease the pain.

How is morphine made?
Morphine is made from opium poppy. Latex is gathered from unripe poppy pods. Another method of manufacturing morphine uses poppy straw which you get from the dried stem and pods of the plant. The crushed poppy plant is treated with sulphuric acid. The resulting mixture goes through numerous extraction processes. Finally alkaloids are precipitated ammonium hydroxide or sodium carbonate. This is further purifying morphine from other opium alkaloids. In 2003 it was discovered that a very small quantities of morphine are found to be produced in the body by natural processes.

The uses of morphine:
Morphine can be used to treat a number of ailments. A few of these include patients suffering from heart attacks, pain associated with surgery, trauma and chronic pain like cancer. It is used as general anesthesia, a substance that puts you to sleep if you need to have a surgery, so that you don’t remember it.

Morphine is used as general anesthesia, a substance that puts you to sleep if you need to have a surgery, so that you don’t remember it.

The side effects of morphine:
Like everything else, too much of morphine is not good for you. It can cause constipation. If taken in excess it can even lead to cardiac arrest. Morphine can cause blood pressure to fall. It may make you feel faint, make things look blurred, give you shortness of breath or slow breathing. So even though morphine relieves stress remember too much of it is not good.

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Surgeons' Uniforms

From: members.tripod.com

Dr. Murray is wearing a double-breasted frock coat, which is partly buttoned showing the closure. The buttons have a rim indicating that they are general staff type buttons, which are regulation for a surgeon. His shoulder straps are those of a staff major, the typical grade of a surgeon. Their fields should be the dark blue of a staff officer, although a rare surgeon may have worn green. His hat is turned so we do not see its insignia (if it even has one), but it should be a staff wreath with the letter U.S. in silver. His trousers should be dark blue with a thin gold cord. When he worn a sash it was a unique green color that was only worn by medical officers.

This photograph is identified as that of Robert Murray, who was one of 114 Regular U.S. Army surgeons on duty on the eve of the Civil War. With the onset of war Regular Army surgeons were called east and found themselves in charge of a chaotic, sometimes disorganized system swamped by ill and wounded soldiers. In the end the Medical Corps responded to the challenge and devised an efficient system of medical care. Dr. Murray served as Medical Director of the Army of Ohio, under Buell and Rosecrans.

Image: Robert Murray, Regular Army Surgeon

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The Hypodermic Syringe: The Shot Felt 'Round the World

From: lifesciencesfoundation.org

Just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War, Scottish physician Alexander Wood invents the hypodermic syringe to facilitate drug administration. Dr. Wood first tests his hollow needle syringe by injecting morphine into a patient. He presents the positive results in an 1855 paper entitled “A New Method for Treating Neuralgia by the Direct Application of Opiates to Painful Points,” published in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal.

Dr. Wood establishes that his syringe has many medical applications, but, initially, it is used mainly for pain management during the carnage of the Civil War. In its experimental phase, the needle is both therapeutic and destructive.

Dr. Wood’s wife is the first recorded injection fatality when she accidentally injects herself with a morphine overdose, and nearly 400,000 returning Civil War veterans develop an addiction to morphine as a result of field hospital injections. The condition is commonly called “Soldier’s Disease.”

In 1954, Becton Dickinson & Company improves upon Dr. Wood’s original design.  The firm develops a disposable glass syringe and needle to administer the Salk polio vaccine to more than one million American children.

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1862 Nurse's Night Light and Broth Warmer

From: joshuasattic.com

This is an excellent example of the Nurse's or Hospital Steward's Night Light which was carried through large hospital wards of convalescing soldiers during the Civil War. The components are made of tin with "tole painted" floral designs on the outer body. A hinged door opens to allow access to a small kerosene lamp with 1862 on knob.

This cast off a warm & gentle light to guide attendants through the rows of beds at night. But it also warmed a tin broth cup above it. Thus, these lamps served the dual purpose of giving light and yielding sustenance to the ill. Sadly, many were cast into trash heaps as electricity made them seem old-fashioned and obsolete.

This one is in unusually good condition. Just imagine sick and dying lay pondering their ultimate fate~ Can you picture those caring hushed figures checking on the wounded by that gentle light~ and bringing them their last warm sustenance upon this earth?

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Stitching Together Civil War History

By Eve M. Kahn, June 29, 2012

Fabric supplies were crucial for both sides in the Civil War, so the Northern  soldiers invading the South would expressly set out to trash cotton fields and burn textile factories.

To cut off the Confederate Army from access to new uniforms, tents and bedding, the Union troops even kidnapped female knitters, weavers and seamstresses and deported them northward. “You don’t just let them stay there so they can move a hundred miles south and work in another mill,” said Madelyn Shaw, a curator of the exhibition "Homefront & Battlefield Quilts & Context in the Civil War,"  in 2012 at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, Mass.

Ms. Shaw and her co-curator, Lynne Zacek Bassett, traveled to private and public collections on and off for three years. They studied all aspects of Civil War-era fabrics, including abolitionists’ slogans on silk handkerchiefs, plantation owners’ deals with Rhode Island mills for rough wool to clothe slaves, and French exports of shirts patterned with crisscrossing Confederate flags.

Two dozen quilts and about 125 related objects are on view, and the wall texts and catalog are full of irony and pathos. Union soldiers found family monograms stitched on Southern sandbags, which wealthy women on plantations had desperately sewn out of their costliest tablecloths and pillowcases. Northern department stores did a brisk business in mourning fabrics, used to make black dresses, veils and bunting for doorways and mirrors.

Confederate and Union sympathizers on the home front would send delicate gifts of pin cushions and mittens to the battlefields, and the extras were sometimes just abandoned at campsites when knapsacks grew too heavy. Troops also found weird uses for nonessential fabrics. The museum has borrowed a floral cotton bandanna that a Kentucky cavalryman used to “tie his boots together and hang them around his neck while he crept silently past the guards during his escape from Camp Douglas, Ill.,” the curators write in the catalog.

During three years of research, however, the curators found that not all wartime legends about antiques turned out to be true. A few quilts long believed to have been used to wrap prisoners of war and dead bodies were actually made of 1880s textiles. “Memory is fallible,” Ms. Shaw said. “Labels get lost or pinned to the wrong thing.”

A recent book, "Civil War Quilts" (Schiffer Publishing), by the historians Pam Weeks and Don Beld, explains how girls and women sewed scraps into flag patterns and added generals’ names, poems and slogans in indelible ink. A Sunday school teacher in Maine inscribed her address on a quilt sent for use in Washington hospitals, so the wounded could correspond and encourage her students to keep sewing. “Your letters would prompt us to more exertions for our patriots,” she wrote, asking to have the textile returned if it survived the war. (It now belongs to the Smithsonian Institution.)

Twenty blankets made by the sisters and mothers of soldiers were on view at the Illinois State Museum’s Chicago gallery, in "Civil War Era Quilts From the Illinois State Museum." “ One checkerboard contains fragments of Union and Confederate uniforms; family lore has it that the quilter had relatives serving on both sides. An 1870s blanket with a star pattern was formed from 14,320 pieces by a wounded veteran who sewed alongside his new bride as a form of postwar therapy.

IMAGE: A quilt from Pennsylvania illustrating the life of a Civil War Zouave-unit soldier, at the American Textile History Museum.

FROM: nytimes.com

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Three-Piece Suppository Mold

From: joshuasattic.com

This is an interesting heavy brass suppository-making mold from the Civil War Period. The three precision-aligned sections are held tightly-together by a pair of thumb-screws at each end. Civil War doctors often made their own medicated preparations. Today, this task is left to Pharmacists and more-often manufacturing facilities at Drug Companies where uniformity of components is better-assured under quality-control conditions.

Visit www.CivilWarRx.com to learn more about Civil War medical instruments and supplies.

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Hospital for Special Surgery

From: hss.edu

In 1863, New York was a burgeoning city of 800,000. Then as now, its diverse population was marked by extremes of wealth and poverty. With little access to life-sustaining work and medical care, growing numbers of poor New Yorkers, especially the lame and deformed, had little hope of improving their lot in life.

With the philanthropic efforts of Robert M. Hartley, Dr. James A. Knight, a general practitioner from Maryland, founded a new institution to meet the needs of this unfortunate group of patients. On April 13, 1863, the Society for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled was incorporated in the State of New York. The Hospital, now the oldest existing orthopedic hospital in the United States, with 28 inpatient beds, was located in Dr. Knight's private residence on Second Avenue and 6th Street. It opened its doors to its first patients on May 1, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. In its first year, 824 patients were received and treated.

It soon became clear that a larger building would be needed to accommodate the growing demand for the Hospital's services. A group of prominent New Yorkers led by John C. Green, a successful China trader, set about raising more than $200,000 for a new facility, which opened in May of 1870 on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, the site presently occupied by the Hyatt Hotel.

The Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled flourished under Dr. Knight's leadership. His attitude toward care emphasized sunshine and fresh air, along with diet, exercise, electrical stimulation, and gentle rehabilitation, known as Expectant Treatment. Given the frequency and severity of surgical infection at the time, Dr. Knight considered surgical treatment detrimental. With few exceptions, surgical operations were not performed during his tenure as Surgeon-in-Chief.

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Study: Mental Trauma Led to Illness in Civil War Troops

From: npr.org

Mental trauma led to physical disease among American Civil War veterans, according to a study appearing in the current issue of the "Archives of General Psychiatry" magazine. Scientists found that younger and more traumatized soldiers had much higher rates of illness later in life. Michelle Trudeau reports on the study, and how the findings could apply to today's veterans.

ALEX CHADWICK, host:
This is DAY TO DAY.
Now a story that never ends, that of the American Civil War. There's a new study about it appearing in the current issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry. It finds that the Civil War had affects on the physical and mental health of veterans throughout their lifetimes. Michelle Trudeau reports.

MICHELLE TRUDEAU reporting:
General William Tecumseh Sherman seems to have predicted the findings of this study when he famously declared, War is hell. Now research psychologist Roxanne Cohen Silver has investigated whether the degree of hellish trauma that a soldier experienced can be linked to increased health problems. She examined the military records of over 15,000 union soldiers, records which give details as to whether a soldier had been wounded or had been a prisoner of war, also the number of deaths in each combat company. During the Civil War many company members came from the same town or even family, and so tabulating deaths in each company indicates the amount of intimate violence that a soldier may have been exposed to, says Silver.

Dr. ROXANNE COHEN SILVER (Professor, UC Irvine): It would represent the numbers of dead bodies that he witnessed, dismembered bodies and dying individuals. And it also represented undoubtedly the degree of loss or bereavement that they had encountered in the war.

TRUDEAU: These 15,000 military records are kept by the National Archives, which also has each soldier's medical records.

Dr. SILVER: We obtained the medical records from the time that they discharged until they died.

TRUDEAU: Available thanks to the life-long relationship between Civil War vets and the federal government.

Dr. SILVER: In order to receive a pension after the Civil War, the veterans would have to go to pension board physicians which were military physicians. And in order to be classified as having a particular ailment, three physicians had to agree on a diagnosis. So these records are remarkably complete, remarkably thorough, and remarkably reliable.

TRUDEAU: When the researchers from the University of California Irvine matched a soldier's military record with his life-long medical records, some strong connections emerged.

Dr. SILVER: The more traumatic the experiences that the soldier encountered in the war, the more likely he was to have physical health ailments and mental health ailments.

TRUDEAU: A 50 percent greater chance of cardiovascular disease, or gastrointestinal problems, and a similar increase in mental health problems, such as depression. The horrors of war, though, had the most brutal impact on young soldiers, enlistees as young as nine years old.

Dr. SILVER: Those who were youngest when they were enlisted had a 93 percent increased risk of developing signs of physical and mental health problems.

TRUDEAU: And these youngest vets also died at a significantly younger age than vets who had been older when they enlisted. Roger Pitman, a research psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, says he's intrigued by this finding because we know, he says, that youngsters have immature nervous systems.

Professor ROGER PITMAN (Research Psychiatrist, Harvard Medical School): Adolescents or even children who have incomplete brain development might not be able to handle the emotional stress of combat as well as persons past their adolescence where their brains are more-or-less completely developed.

TRUDEAU: The bottom line, Pitman adds, is that war has extracted similar costs from veterans of every era.

For NPR News, I'm Michelle Trudeau.

Image: Indiana Hospital for the Insane, Indianapolis, Indiana

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