MEDICAMENTS AND LIFE. 217 



effective upon man in that manner. Narceine puts animals 

 to sleep more readily than morphine, while the reverse is 

 the case with us; yet the former, though less powerful 

 than the latter as to the soothing of pain and the produc- 

 tion of sleep, seems to be preferred with good reason in 

 therapeutics. Narceine, in a dose of twenty- five centi- 

 grammes, induces a calm and refreshing sleep, followed by 

 an awakening after which none of the troubles are experi- 

 enced which follow the administration of morphine, such as 

 weariness and nausea. It should be preferred also as a 

 remedy for pain, since, in neutralizing pain in patients, it 

 produces in them a most desirable condition of comfort; 

 nothing is better for neuralgia, for instance. Narceine and 

 morphine have, moreover, a property which explains the 

 well-known effects of opium in intestinal discharges. 



These labors present another proof of the benefit thera- 

 peutics gains from chemistry, and of the fixed connection 

 there is between the improvement of one and the advance 

 of the other. So long as opium was a mystery for chem- 

 ists, it was one for doctors too. The moment the substance 

 of that complex drug was decomposed into a certain num- 

 ber of well-defined principles, and the nature of their 

 blending was ascertained exactly, that moment it became 

 possible to decompose not merely the substance, but the 

 physiological force of opium, and to reduce it to a small 

 number of distinct potencies. Now, thanks to the labors 

 of Bernard and Rabuteau, physicians can arrive at an un- 

 derstanding of the mode in which ancient therapeutics 

 felt its way as to the use of opiates, and they are able for 

 the future to act with precision on this or that function, by 

 prescribing this or that pure alkaloid whose properties are 

 known. 



By uniting with the influence of narceine or morphine 

 that of chloroform, we produce new and very curious 

 phenomena. Bernard had already observed that insensi- 



