Albert Schweitzer called pain “a more terrible lord of mankind than even death.” Thus, it is not surprising that humans have from the earliest times attempted to identify plants which might provide pain relief. The Odyssey by Homer provides a mythic account of the use of one such agent. . . . Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, took other counsel. Straightaway she cast into the wine of which they were drinking a drug to quit all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill. Whoso should drink this down, when it is mingled in the bowl, would not in the course of that day let a tear fall down over his cheeks, no, not though his mother and father should lie there dead . . . Such cunning drugs had the daughter of Zeus, drugs of healing, which Polydamna, the wife of Thor, had given her, a woman of Egypt, for there the earth, the giver of grain, bears the greatest store of drugs . . . . . . More than a century ago, it was suggested by Oswald Schmiedeberg, a German scientist regarded by many as the father of modern pharmacology, that the drug to which Homer refers is opium for “no other natural product on the whole earth calls forth in man such a psychical blunting as the one described.” When today, in the fields of Afghanistan or Turkey or India, the seed capsule of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, is pierced, a milky fluid oozes from it which, when dried, is opium. Virginia Berridge, in her elegant history of opium in England, tells us that the effects of opium on the human mind have probably been known for about 6,000 years and that opium had an honored place in Greek, Roman, and Arabic medicine. I will not dwell on that ancient history but will instead jump ahead to the 17th century by which time opium had gained wide use in European medicine.
The History of Neuroscience 3: Where Were the Human Mind and Soul in the 17th Century?
