Aspirin: A Look Back at Its History

Take 2 willow leaves and call me in the morning. The healing propertiesof aspirin, a synthetic derivative of salicylic acid, were discovered circa 3500–4000 BC when the Assyrians and the Sumerians used the extract of willow leaves for relief of musculoskeletal pain and as an antipyretic. Later, bark taken from the willow tree, Salix alba, was adopted by the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek civilizations. Hippocrates (460–370 BCE), the father of modern medicine, gave tea brewed from willow bark to women to lessen pain during childbirth. In the first century CE, the Greek physician Dioscorides prescribed willow bark as an anti-inflammatory.

Spread to the West, and to the East. After those very early years, willow began to be used in various parts of the world as an analgesic, antipyretic, and migraine remedy. Various indigenous populations used extracts for fever, osteoarthritis, and headache. By 216 CE, the use of willow bark spread throughout the Western world as well as China and other eastern countries. Extracts of salicylates-containing plants were used to treat rheumatic pains, wounds, ulcers, headache, and dysmenorrhea during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance period, and later years leading up to the 18^th century.

Barking up the right tree. In England in the mid-1700s, the Reverend Edward Stone, a clergyman and university fellow, studied the healing properties of willow bark in the search for an alternative to cinchona bark for treating “the agues,” or malarial fever. In 1763, he outlined his findings in a letter to the president of the Royal Society: “It hath been given I believe to fifty perfons, and never failed in the cure, except in a few autumual and quartun agues, with which the patients have been long and feverely afflicted.” The Reverend Stone was the first author to demonstrate the effectiveness of willow bark as an antipyretic with scientific rigor.