Friedrich Serturner (1783-1841) had first
             applied chemical analysis to plant drugs and discovered how to purify the
             main active ingredient of opium. Recalling Morpheus, the Greek god of
             dreams, Serturner gave his drug the name `morphium', which later became
             morphine. The discoverer of morphine was in due course nominated for
             academic honors. The possibility of obtaining morphine and other pure
             drugs from plants brought commercial reward for many pharmaceutical
             entrepreneurs such as Georg Merck (1825-73). He turned his family's
             seventeenth-century pharmacy in Darmstadt into a major supplier of these
             new products. Morphine came to market at a time of high demand, and was
             widely used for pain relief in the American Civil War and the Franco-
             Prussian War, in combination with the hypodermic syringe, which was
             ...