Figure 9.2. Opium poppy, Papaver somniferum.Sertiirner’s discovery had profound implications. It was the first
time a chemical substance had been isolated from a plant and shown
to account for the medicinal properties of the plant. This finding gave
birth to a new way of thinking about plant medicines. In the coming
years of the nineteenth century, chemists, pretty much all of whom
were working in Germany, would seek out and discover the chemical
principles associated with the physiological actions of many plants.
Caffeine isolated from coffee and tea, nicotine from tobacco, cocaine
from coca, atropine from belladonna, and mescaline from peyote are
examples of these nineteenth-century discoveries.