The history of medicine has been enriched by thousands of plant species, but one plant--the willow--has probably been used and prescribed more than any other powdered drug. Willow is the original source of aspirin. Even today, when aspirin substitutes are available, up to 80 million tablets of aspirin are used each day in North America, and up to 50 million pounds each year are swallowed throughout the world. Now aspirin can be easily made by reacting phenol and carbon dioxide.
Hippocrates of Cos (460-377 B.C.) noted that chewing leaves of willow (Salix) reduced pain, and he prescribed this remedy for women in labor. Hippocrates certainly did not discover this drug, which was used for centuries earlier in European folk medicine. [We should be cautious in crediting Hippocrates with everything because researchers have suggested that the extensive collection of medical writings found in Alexandria, formerly ascribed to Hippocrates, may have been written by several people, the most influential of whom was Hippocrates.] Subsequent ancient Greek physicians recommended willow for alleviating pain and reducing fever and inflammation. In North America, probably even before the Greeks, the Alabama, Chickasaw, and Montagnai Indians used willow to relieve fevers, aches, and pains, and the beneficial effects were also known to the Hottentots of southern Africa.
Advocates of the Doctrine of Signatures described how willow worked to reduce inflammation of joints because the "weeping" branches were very flexible, like human limbs. As late as 1763, an English clergyman named Edward Stone (also known as Edmund Stone) wrote that willow is useful for lowering fever because both willow and fever thrive in damp regions.
In the 1820s, European chemists, eagerly studying the chemistry of plants, were able to isolate from willow a glycoside, which was named salicin, after the genus. Salicin was also discovered in poplars and aspens (also Salicaceae). In the laboratory, Karl Löwig (1839) treated salicin with acid--as salicin is acted on in the human stomach--to make salicylic acid, and about that time salicylic acid was also discovered occurring naturally in a European species of Spiraea (dropwort). Salicylic acid had major medicinal uses and soon became a panacea. A related compound being used at that time was methyl salicylate, found in an oil from birch bark (Betula lenta) and oil of wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens), long used to relieve aches. In this century, oil of wintergreen was formerly used in "analgesics" (rubefacients) for athletes.
The problem with salicylic acid was that, for many, it caused nausea and great gastric discomfort. A different compound was synthesized in 1853 by Carl von Gerhardt by putting an acetyl group on salicylic acid, making acetylsalicylic acid, which is a chemical salt (solid). Nonetheless, no one was aware of the more gentle properties of this compound until 1893, when Felix Hoffman, an employee of Friedrich Bayer and Company, found an easier way to make this salt and then tested it on his father, who had arthritis. In 1899, Bayer, which started in 1863 as a dye production company, marketed this medicine as "aspirin"--coming from the words 'acetyl' and Spiraea. The price of aspirin initially was expensive until Bayer learned how to mass produce tablets. Aspirin was thus the first major medicine in the world to be sold in tablet form.
As the ancients already knew, aspirin is a remarkable painkiller, i.e., an analgesic. Research indicates that painkilling results from the depressant action of aspirin on the central nervous tissue, somehow by reducing mild to moderate pain messages from reaching the brain. A very important use of aspirin is as an antipyretic, i.e., to lower body temperature (fever), via the dissipation of heat through effects on the hypothalamus, increasing sweating. The third major use of aspirin is as an anti-inflammatory agent (reduce swelling), as for victims of arthritis and "rheumatism."
OH WILLOW, DON'T WEEP
Oh willow, don't weep!
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