Although my posts for the next few weeks are mostly going to be repeats as the website gets built, I couldn’t help but write up this story about willow tree bark and aspirin.
Dear reader, you, like me, may have been under the impression that for millennia, people in different parts of the world relied on the bark of willow trees to treat headaches, arthritis, fever, and pain. In many, many histories of medicine, the adage that willow bark is what makes up aspirin is repeated. But the situation is more complex.
While it is true that willow bark contains salicin, which does relieve pain, the concentrations needed to gain these effects are far higher than Ancient and Medieval people were likely to have experimented with. In fact, sources that talk about using willow bark by Hippocrates, Celsus, Dioscorides and the like mostly talk about using the plant externally, in fumigations or heat packs.
It wasn’t until the mid- 1700s that the British Reverend Edward Stone decided to deliberately concentrate the bark that he discovered that the substance salicin had pain-relieving properties. It took until 1899 for the German chemist Felix Hoffmann — working for the company Bayer — to create a molecularly similar substance called aspirin, which obviously had great success.
Sources: Oct 18, 2020, Philippa Martyr, _The Conversation_, “Hippocrates and willow bark: what you know about the history of aspirin is probably wrong.” Image: BL Egerton 747 fol 94
