Abstract: understanding.' On this proposition, the authors construct an original survey of the scope of the natural sciences for the intelligent lay reader. Describing and then using the symbolic nature of play to illustrate their arguments, and aided by some splendid illustrations, they explore the major implications of molecular biology, evolutionary theory, social organization, cerebral function, aesthetics and the limits of modern knowledge. Lithium makes a brief appearance in the concentrated, high-minded exposition, but it is the extended notion of Homo ludens which should interest far-sighted psychiatrists.

Abstract: In the following pages an attempt will be made to present not a complete outline but certain significant aspects connected with the evolution of the opium habit in Assam and the B¡&dquo;1tÏ3h policy to combat it between 1826, the year in which Assam passed under the control of the East India Company and 1860, which the private manufacture of opium was banned throughout the province. It is necessary to mention here that at a time

Abstract: VIRGINIA BERRIDGE and GRIFFITH EDWARDS, Opium and the people: Opiate use in nineteenth-century England, London, Allen Lane; New York, St. Martin's Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. xxx, 369, £20.00. After reading Opium and the people, one is tempted to believe that opium was the religion of the masses. The drug was omnipresent in Victorian society. It was sold, without restriction, not only by chemists, but by booksellers, drapers, and even haberdashers. It was available as powder, as pills, and, most popularly, in alcohol, as laudanum. Later in the century, it was available as an injectible alkaloid, morphine. It was the active ingredient in many of the most notorious Victorian patent medicines, including Godfrey's Cordial and Collis Browne's Chlorodyne. Opium was used as a sedative, an anaesthetic, an anodyne, a hang-over remedy, and as an anti-diarrhoea agent. It was bought by the Nottingham lace-worker to quieten her colicky infant; by the Fenland agricultural labourer to relieve the pains of ague; by the London clerk to commit suicide; and by Thomas De Quincey to enhance the sensual pleasure of a night at the opera. The first seventeen historical chapters are written by Virginia Berridge. Griffith Edwards has added a concluding chapter that relates the nineteenth-century experience to the present. Berridge draws imaginatively on an array of literary and quantitative evidence to construct a richly-documented case. She argues that the perception of opium changed drastically in the course of the century. Before 1850, opium was used freely and widely without arousing much concern. In the latter half of the century, both medical and lay observers began to denounce the drug. This was not so much because actual opium consumption was rising, Berridge states (although this is a matter of some confusion in the book), but because of the changing social context. Professionalization of pharmacists and medical men, the debate over the India-China opium trade, the temperance movement, and the class bias in society all affected the way later Victorians perceived the drug. On the whole, Berridge makes a powerful and convincing case. Over the past few years, I have been dealing with some of the same issues that Berridge addresses in this book, although I have sometimes approached them differently.' It seems appropriate to me to emphasize three of these major differences.

Abstract: Opium is among the early naturally occurring drugs used to alleviate pain or at least to create a feeling of detachment from pain. The crude extract of the poppy seedpod (Papaver somniferum), opium not only relieves pain but also causes euphoria and narcosis. With the isolation of the principal alkaloid, morphine, by Frederick Serturner in 1803, the use of crude opium preparations to lessen pain became obsolete. Morphine, named after Morpheus, God of dreams, was widely used until its toxic and addicting properties were recognized and triggered the search for synthetic or semisynthetic opiates, hopefully void of addiction liability. The results have been disappointing. A number of opiates such as heroin and meperidine were originally hailed as miraculous substitutes for morphine but later were found to create serious medical and social problems of drug addiction worldwide. Numerous attempts have been made to define the mechanism(s) of opiate analgesia, with the hope that once the mechanism of pain inhibition is understood, such mechanism alone can be triggered to produce analgesia without causing undesirable effects.

Abstract: Contemporary research on the mode of action of narcotic analgesics has its origins in antiquity. The physical and psychological effects of the extract of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) were known to the ancient Sumerians (ca. 4000 B.C.) and were noted in the Eber papyrus, an Egyptian hieroglyphic document (ca. 1550 B.C.). Of the more than 20 alkaloids contained in opium, morphine, which was first isolated by Serturner in 1803, is the most important constituent. The relatively slow progress in elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying the myriad of pharmacological effects of morphine and its congeners may lie in part in our as yet incomplete understanding of the operations of the target tissue, the central nervous system (CNS). However, developments in the neurochemical and neuropharmacological aspects of opiate research in the past 9 years have engendered considerable activity and excitement. The exponential increase in the number of scientific reports in this field of research is an indication of the importance attached to this area of neurobiology. Two major breakthroughs, the discovery of opiate receptors in the CNS of animals and man and the ensuing discovery of endogenous opiate-like ligands for these receptors, are the focal points of this overview.