How much morphine in a medics kit

Factual Questions
1

so, I’m watching Private Ryan, and they’re injecting wounded soldiers with preloaded mophine syringes. Anybody know the dosage on that? Just professional curiosity.

2

Googling around, it looks like a pack of five 1.5cc syrettes was most common. A few of the sites that I found said that morphine tartrate was added to packs at the direction of the CO.

3

  1. How long does morphine last without refrigeration?

  2. Is it true that some bush pilots carry morphine in their survival kits, in case they are severely injured in a crash? (If so, I assume the would return the unused drug as it expires and replace it with a new one.)

4

What was the concentration of those 1.5mL syrettes? Do you know?

I’m assuming it was the same back then as now, but morphine doesn’t require any refrigeration, it is stable at room temperature.

5

Generally if you are using intramuscular morphine sulphate 5-10mg is a standard dose.

Off the top of my head I don’t know the dose conversion for the tartrate.

When I’ve carried a cardiac ambulance bleep (i.e. if it goes off I get taken in an ambulance to the home of someone having a heart attack and give them lysis immediately*) I’ve carried 20mg of Morphine Sulphate with me at all times. I would imagine an army medic would need more.

  • In actuality I was often called to the home of someone who had chest pain of a non-cardiac cause, or I was called to the home when CPR was already in progress so that the paramedics could stop on the instructions of a doctor. The latter situation was sadly quite common, and lead my boss at the time to nickname the cardiac ambulance the “mobile death certification unit.”
6

Interesting,
In my neck of the woods medics can request a termination or a non-initiation of CPR order over the radio.

I would have figured 5 or 10mg was a reasonable one size fits all dosage for combat wounds, I was just curious about the specific dose they carried.

7

Pre-filled morphine syringes come in two sizes, 1 ml=10mg for adults and 1ml=1mg for pediatrics. EMS carries 10 mg. During Viet Nam medics carried the adult dose prefilleds. At least, that’s what they taught us in Medic school. I spent the Viet Nam years in Amarillo, TX, on a pediatric ward.