Friedrich Sertürner: Life and Career (1783–1841)

Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner was a small-town German pharmacist who, working behind the counter of a provincial apothecary’s shop, pulled a pure crystalline substance out of opium and showed that it carried the drug’s power to bring sleep. He called it morphium, after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. It was the first alkaloid — the first nitrogen-containing “plant base” — ever isolated, and the historians of pharmacy count it as one of the moments when the old apothecary’s craft turned into a laboratory science. Yet Sertürner was never a professor. He spent his whole working life running pharmacies in three small towns of north-west Germany, through the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars, and he did much of his chemistry in the back room of a shop.

This page tells the story of the man rather than the molecule: his childhood at Schloss Neuhaus near Paderborn, his apprenticeship and examination, the long struggle to run a pharmacy of his own in Einbeck under the shifting laws of the French-ruled Kingdom of Westphalia, his later years at the council pharmacy in Hameln, the honours that came to him from Jena to Paris, the wide-ranging and sometimes speculative work he did beyond morphine — on galvanism, firearms, “chemical physics” and a remarkably early theory of cholera — and his last years. The discovery itself is summarised only briefly here; it has its own page, The Isolation of Morphine. The life story below follows the German national biography (Neue Deutsche Biographie) and the history-of-medicine papers by Jurna, Goerig and Schulte am Esch, Klockgether-Radke and Krishnamurti and Rao, noting where those sources disagree.

Table of Contents

  1. A Surveyor’s Son at Schloss Neuhaus
  2. Apprenticed at the Paderborn Court Pharmacy
  3. The Assistant’s Examination of 1803
  4. Einbeck and the Council Pharmacy
  5. A Pharmacy Under Napoleonic Law
  6. The Discovery in Brief
  7. The Ratsapotheke in Hameln
  8. Honours from Jena to Paris
  9. Galvanism, Firearms and a Theory of Cholera
  10. Last Years and Burial in Einbeck
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. A Surveyor’s Son at Schloss Neuhaus

Sertürner was born on 19 June 1783 at Schloss Neuhaus, the Renaissance residence of the prince-bishops of Paderborn in Westphalia. The village that grew up around the palace is today part of the city of Paderborn in Germany. (One short English-language biography places Neuhaus in “present-day Austria”; that is a slip — Neuhaus has always lain in Westphalia.)

According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, his father, Simon Joseph Sertürner (about 1728–1798), had been born in Moravia and trained in Austria as a military administrator. He came to Paderborn in the service of the prince-bishop and worked there as a surveyor, map-maker and architect. His mother was Maria Theresia Brockmann, who died in 1819. Friedrich had one brother and six sisters. Some English accounts give the father’s name and the number of children differently; the German national biography is followed here.

A Westphalian prince-bishopric at the end of the eighteenth century was a small Catholic state ruled by a churchman who was also a territorial prince, with a court, officials and craftsmen gathered around his residence. Growing up as the son of a court surveyor meant growing up in contact with technical work — measuring, drawing plans, calculating — and with the court institutions of the little state, one of which was its pharmacy. That background mattered: a court official’s son had a reasonable claim to a respectable trade, and pharmacy, which combined the handling of medicinal plants with chemistry, was one of them.

The world of his childhood did not last. In the years after the French Revolution, war swept across the German lands, and in 1802–1803 the ecclesiastical principalities, Paderborn among them, were dissolved and handed to secular rulers. The prince-bishop’s court that had employed his father disappeared, and by the time Sertürner was a young man the region had passed under French influence. His career would be shaped, again and again, by these political changes.

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2. Apprenticed at the Paderborn Court Pharmacy

Simon Joseph Sertürner died in 1798, when Friedrich was fifteen. The following year, 1799, the boy began an apprenticeship at the court pharmacy (Hofapotheke) in Paderborn under the court apothecary Franz Anton Cramer, as recorded in the Neue Deutsche Biographie. Krishnamurti and Rao describe him as being apprenticed at sixteen “after his parents’ deaths”, but his mother lived until 1819, so it was his father’s death that sent him into the trade.

An apothecary’s apprenticeship of the period was a hands-on education. The apprentice lived in the master’s household, swept the shop, ground roots and barks, prepared tinctures, extracts and powders according to the official pharmacopoeia, and gradually learned the chemistry of the day from the master and from books. Formal schooling in chemistry was scarce; most of what a pharmacist knew came from this kind of practical training and from his own reading.

The question that started it all

It was in this apprentice’s world that Sertürner found the problem he would spend more than a decade on. The Neue Deutsche Biographie relates that, as an apprentice, he noticed that opium preparations made with great care still varied in their narcotic strength. Opium, the dried milky juice of the poppy, was one of the most important drugs in any pharmacy, yet no one knew what substance inside it did the work. Klockgether-Radke notes that before the nineteenth century the compounds in opium were unknown, which made exact dosing almost impossible. The young apprentice set out to find opium’s active principle. Influenced by the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who had isolated a series of acids from plants, he at first expected that principle to be an acid.

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3. The Assistant’s Examination of 1803

In 1803, at the age of twenty, Sertürner passed his examination as a pharmacist’s assistant (Apothekergehilfe), a date given both by the Neue Deutsche Biographie and by Jurna. Passing it ended his apprenticeship and allowed him to work in a pharmacy as a qualified journeyman, though not yet to own or run one.

The examination fell in the same years as his first opium experiments. Klockgether-Radke dates the isolation of a crystalline substance from opium to 1803/04, and many accounts give 1804; the exact year has been debated for a long time, and in 1954 the pharmacy historian H. Coenen devoted an entire paper to the question of when the discovery was made in Paderborn. What is agreed is that the young assistant’s first chemistry on opium was done at the very start of his career, with the modest equipment of a pharmacy laboratory.

The status of a pharmacist’s assistant explains much of what followed. An assistant could experiment, but he depended on a master for a place to work, and to become independent he needed both a further qualification and, under the rules of the time, a pharmacy privilege — the right, granted by a ruler or a town, to run a pharmacy in a given place. Those privileges were limited in number and valuable. For the next eighteen years Sertürner’s life would revolve around obtaining one.

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4. Einbeck and the Council Pharmacy

Around 1805 or 1806 Sertürner left the Paderborn region for Einbeck, a small town in the south of what is now Lower Saxony, to work as assistant in the town council’s pharmacy, the Ratsapotheke. The sources disagree by a year: the Neue Deutsche Biographie gives 1805, while Jurna and Papini give 1806.

A council pharmacy belonged, in effect, to the town: the council held the privilege and let the business to a tenant apothecary, who ran it and employed assistants. Einbeck’s tenant was an elderly man, and Sertürner, as his assistant, had good reason to hope that he would one day take over the shop.

His first published reports on opium date from these years. According to Jurna and Papini, he described a substance from opium with an alkaline character in a letter to the editor of Johann Bartholomäus Trommsdorff’s Journal der Pharmacie, printed in volume 13 (1805), followed by a longer paper in volume 14 on “pure poppy acid” and a chemical study of opium with special regard to a newly discovered substance in it. Goerig and Schulte am Esch note that this first report remained unnoticed. Trommsdorff, as the Neue Deutsche Biographie records, urged him to repeat the experiments on a larger scale — work Sertürner returned to over the following decade while he made his living in the shop.

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5. A Pharmacy Under Napoleonic Law

In 1807 Napoleon created the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French-ruled state under his brother Jérôme, and Einbeck became part of it. French-style law replaced many of the old guild and privilege rules, including some of those that governed pharmacies.

That change opened a door for Sertürner. In 1809 he qualified as a pharmacist. The elderly tenant of the Einbeck council pharmacy — 75 years old, according to Jurna — did not hand the business over to him. Under the law of the Kingdom of Westphalia, however, Sertürner was allowed to open his own pharmacy in the town, a second one alongside the council’s, as Jurna, Papini and the Neue Deutsche Biographie all relate. Under the old system that would have been almost impossible: the established privilege would have shut a competitor out.

For eight years, from 1809, he ran his own shop in Einbeck, and it was there that he carried out the larger-scale opium experiments that led to his 1817 paper. The arrangement, though, depended on the French order. After Napoleon’s defeat, the Kingdom of Westphalia was dissolved in 1813 and the old authorities returned, bringing back the old privilege system. The Westphalian concession that had allowed Sertürner’s pharmacy lapsed, and the Neue Deutsche Biographie dates the closure of his Einbeck pharmacy to 1817. The very year his scientific reputation was made, he lost his shop.

His story is a vivid example of how a scientific career in early nineteenth-century Germany could hang on politics. The freedom that let him set up on his own came from an occupying power; its withdrawal left him, already in his thirties and newly famous, looking for a pharmacy to run.

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6. The Discovery in Brief

The full story is told on the page The Isolation of Morphine: Sertürner’s Experiments, 1804–1817. In outline:

The natural source of the drug, the opium poppy, has its own page, The Opium Poppy and the Chemistry of Morphine, and what came after — the cascade of plant alkaloids, the hypodermic syringe and the addiction findings — is on The Alkaloid Revolution and Morphine in Medicine.

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7. The Ratsapotheke in Hameln

Sertürner’s search for a permanent pharmacy ended in Hameln (Hamelin), the town on the Weser best known for the legend of the Pied Piper. There he bought the town’s council pharmacy, the Ratsapotheke, for 20,000 taler. The Neue Deutsche Biographie dates his privilege to 1 January 1821 and records that he ran the business successfully until his death twenty years later.

The price gives a sense of what a pharmacy privilege was worth: it was a substantial property, and it secured a pharmacist’s income and standing for life. After years of uncertainty in Einbeck, Sertürner now had what he had been seeking since his apprenticeship — a pharmacy of his own, on a secure legal footing.

Marriage and family

In the same year, 1821, he married Eleonore von Rettberg (1798–1871) in Einbeck. According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, she was the daughter of a colonel and military commandant. The couple had three sons and four daughters. One son, Viktor Sertürner (1834–1887), became a pharmacist himself and later took over the Hameln pharmacy, carrying the family business into the next generation.

Hameln was the setting for the rest of Sertürner’s working life. From there he continued to publish, including a short note on newly discovered cinchona alkaloids in the Archiv der Pharmazie in 1829 — a sign that he kept following the field of plant bases that his morphine work had opened, in the years when French pharmacists were pulling quinine and other alkaloids out of medicinal barks and seeds.

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8. Honours from Jena to Paris

Recognition, when it came, came quickly after 1817. That year the University of Jena awarded him a doctorate (Dr. phil.), recorded by the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Jurna and Krishnamurti and Rao. For a pharmacist who had never attended university, it was a striking mark of acceptance by the academic world. (Popular accounts sometimes credit the poet Goethe, a patron of Jena’s university, with prompting the degree; that story does not appear in the scholarly sources used here.)

Learned societies

The Neue Deutsche Biographie lists a series of memberships that followed over two decades:

The Prix Montyon, 1831

The most prestigious honour came from France. In 1831 the Institut de France awarded him a Prix Montyon, one of the prizes founded by the philanthropist Baron de Montyon to reward discoveries that made medicine or surgery less harmful or more effective. Krishnamurti and Rao add that the award carried the title “Benefactor of Humanity”. France, whose chemists had first spread his discovery in translation, now gave him its prize; his work had been taken up more readily in Paris than at home.

Even so, Jurna writes that although many institutions honoured him, Sertürner felt that he was not properly esteemed — a feeling that would colour his later years.

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9. Galvanism, Firearms and a Theory of Cholera

Morphine was only one part of Sertürner’s intellectual life. The Neue Deutsche Biographie describes a man of wide and restless interests who wrote on subjects far from pharmacy.

Galvanism and firearms

He studied galvanism, the electrical phenomena that Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta had made the most exciting topic in the natural sciences around 1800. He also worked on firearms and projectiles — a practical subject in an age of almost continuous war.

Chemical physics and his own journal

Between 1820 and 1822 he published a System der chemischen Physik (“System of Chemical Physics”), which the Neue Deutsche Biographie reads as showing his attachment to the Romantic natural philosophy (Naturphilosophie) of the period — the German movement that sought grand unifying systems connecting chemistry, electricity, life and mind. In 1826 he founded his own journal, the Annalen für das Universalsystem der Elemente (“Annals for the Universal System of the Elements”), to publish his ideas. The national biography notes that this later, speculative work lost him recognition among scientists, who were moving decisively towards experiment and away from such systems.

A living poison: the cholera hypothesis of 1831

His most striking idea outside pharmacy concerned cholera. In 1831 cholera reached central Europe for the first time, carried west by the pandemic that had begun in India, killing tens of thousands and terrifying a public that had no idea how it spread. Most physicians blamed “miasma”, bad air rising from filth. According to Jurna and the Neue Deutsche Biographie, Sertürner proposed instead that cholera was caused by a poisonous, living being that could reproduce itself, and he suggested ways of avoiding infection that Jurna judges still valid today.

Read with hindsight, the hypothesis seems to anticipate the germ theory of disease by half a century — the cholera bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, was not described and linked to the disease until much later in the century. It is best understood as a speculation rather than a discovery: Sertürner had no microscope evidence for his living poison, and the idea was one of several contagion theories in circulation. But it shows the same instinct that led him to morphine — a conviction that a disease, like a drug, had a definite material cause that could in principle be identified. The site’s pages on cholera and on Vibrio cholerae describe what was eventually found.

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10. Last Years and Burial in Einbeck

Sertürner’s last years in Hameln were not happy ones by the accounts of his biographers. Jurna writes that despite his honours he felt underappreciated, that his behaviour became odd and that his health declined. The Neue Deutsche Biographie describes the same period from the side of his work: as he turned towards speculative natural-philosophical systems, his later writing lost the recognition his morphine research had earned.

Some popular accounts claim that he became dependent on morphine in later life, or that he took it for a painful illness. That claim is not made in the scholarly biographies consulted for this page (the Neue Deutsche Biographie and the papers by Jurna, Goerig and Schulte am Esch, Klockgether-Radke, Krishnamurti and Rao, and Papini), and it is not confirmed here.

Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner died in Hameln on 20 February 1841, aged 57. He was buried not in Hameln but in Einbeck, the town where he had made his discovery and married, in the chapel of St Bartholomäus. His son Viktor carried on the Hameln pharmacy.

How he is remembered

Historians of medicine have generally judged that the significance of his work outran the recognition he felt during his lifetime. Klockgether-Radke, writing on the two-hundredth anniversary of the discovery, describes morphine as the first pure opioid available for calculated pain therapy with one defined compound, and as the foundation of alkaloid chemistry. Goerig and Schulte am Esch place him among the founders of scientific pharmacy. Schmitz’s history in the journal Pharmacy in History and the later chromatographic study by Haussermann and Schecker, which asked whether his preparation was truly pure morphine, show how closely later generations have examined his work. For a man who spent his life behind a pharmacy counter in three small towns, it is a large legacy: nearly every plant-derived drug that followed — quinine, codeine and many more — was isolated by methods that grew out of his.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Jurna I. [Sertürner and morphine--a historical vignette]. Schmerz. 2003;17(4):280-3. PubMed PMID: 12923678
  2. Goerig M, Schulte am Esch J. [Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner--the discoverer of morphine]. Anasthesiol Intensivmed Notfallmed Schmerzther. 1991;26(8):492-8. PubMed PMID: 1786314
  3. Klockgether-Radke AP. [F. W. Sertürner and the discovery of morphine. 200 years of pain therapy with opioids]. Anasthesiol Intensivmed Notfallmed Schmerzther. 2002;37(5):244-9. PubMed PMID: 12015680
  4. Krishnamurti C, Rao SC. The isolation of morphine by Serturner. Indian J Anaesth. 2016;60(11):861-862. PubMed PMID: 27942064
  5. Schmitz R. Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner and the discovery of morphine. Pharm Hist. 1985;27(2):61-74. PubMed PMID: 11611724
  6. Coenen H. [On the year of morphine discovery in Paderborn by Sertürner]. Arch Pharm Ber Dtsch Pharm Ges. 1954;287(4):165-80. PubMed PMID: 13198184
  7. Haussermann H, Schecker HJ. [Has Serturner isolated pure morphine? Paper chromatographic purity tests for the alkaloid]. Arch Pharm Ber Dtsch Pharm Ges. 1957;290/62(10):509-16. PubMed PMID: 13471017
  8. Hosztafi S. The discovery of alkaloids. Pharmazie. 1997;52(7):546-50. PubMed PMID: 9266593
  9. Sertuerner. Ueber das Morphium, eine neue salzfähige Grundlage, und die Mekonsäure, als Hauptbestandtheile des Opiums. Annalen der Physik. 1817;55(1):56-89. DOI: 10.1002/andp.18170550104
  10. Choulant FA. Bestätigung und Wichtigkeit der Entdeckung eines neuen Alkali (des Morphium), welches Herr Sertürner in dem Opium aufgefunden hat. Annalen der Physik. 1817;56(8):337-354. DOI: 10.1002/andp.18170560802
  11. Sertürner. Neuentdeckte Chinaalkaloide. Archiv der Pharmazie. 1829;30(1):106-108. DOI: 10.1002/ardp.18290300133
  12. Papini AM. From morphine to endogenous opioid peptides, e.g., endorphins: the endless quest for the perfect painkiller. Substantia. 2018;2(2):81-91. DOI: 10.13128/substantia-63

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