Medicine: Painkiller

Physicians, to whom morphine is familiar as the best painkiller known to medical science, and addicts, whom in the end it turns into pain-racked skeletons, found much interest in the announcement last week of a synthetic painkiller, which researchers claim is as good as morphine but safer and less habit-forming.

The new synthetic, first made by Germany’s I. G. Farbenindustrie in 1939, is an organic chemical with a freight-train name, known as Demerol for short. It is not yet on the market.

For three years Chemist David Climenko of Alba Pharmaceutical Co. has been checking Demerol’s effect on animals. Last week in Boston, before the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, he reported satisfactory results. At the same time Dr. Robert C. Batterman of New York University told of using Demerol on 800 human patients. It quickly relieved postoperative pain, cut down the agony of arthritis and other diseases. Neither Chemist Climenko’s animals nor Dr. Batterman’s men & women developed any craving for the drug.