Friedrich Sertuner, a German pharmacist, first isolated morphine from poppy seed. It contains 24 alkaloids. He named the compound he discovered morphine, in honor of Morpheus, the Roman god of sleep. In 1898, Bayer applied the acetylation process (which Felix Hofmann had applied five years earlier to salicyclic acid to obtain aspirin) to morphine, resulting in heroin. Bayer promptly marketed it, deemed to have no side effects, as a cough suppressant and a remedy for headaches, emphysema, and tuberculosis. When the side effects became known, Bayer stopped advertising it and gradually withdrew it from the market.
