1897 – 1905
- Certain plants and the liquids that
were extracted from them, were know already among the aboriginal people well
before our modern civilization was born. With these plants, one could for
example ease the pain. The bark of willow from which salicin is extracted, was
known during the antiquity, that it could be used to inflammations and to heal
rheumatism.
- The belief that the bark of willow and
it’s leafs would cure rheumatism was based on the fact that it was thought
that the disease and it’s cure would be found from the same place. In this
case, the rheumatism was more common in damp areas and the willow was also found
from these areas.
- Parson Edward Stone made the first good report of treating patients with willow essence in the year 1763. He treated fever patients with water, that contained a one-gram of willow bark in the water. He reported that the results were excellent with the fever patients. Doctor Thomas MacLagan made the first real clinical trial. He treated one hundred patients suffering from rheumatism fever with salicin that had been extracted from willow. The result of his experiment was excellent and he reported few years after the trial, that all of his patients were cured as a result of the treatment.
- Few other researchers before Thomas
MacLagan had noticed that salicin is turned into a salicylic acid in the body
and that this had an effect to ease the pain and fever. Additionally it was
noted that it was possible to manufacture salicylic acid artificially.
- These discoveries resulted the fact,
that to satisfy the demand for salicylic acid a huge factory was build to
Germany in the town of Dresden. Despite the fact that salicylic acid was a
powerful medicine for fever, it also could cause serious damage to stomach and
also tasted horrible. For this reason the German company Bayer set a goal for
itself to find another alternative for salicylic acid that would not be so
harmful. Doctor Felix Hoffman was chosen to solve this problem, as his father
suffered from chronic arthritis and took a salicylic acid regularly.
- Hoffman like many other researcher in
Bayer that time worked under the chemist Carl Duisberg, who was in charge of the
many ground breaking discoveries made by Bayer. Hoffman used his own father as a
guinea pig and finally after trying out several different modifications, he
discovered in 1897, that his father tolerated acetylsalicylic acid the best.
Acetylsalicylic acid appeared to the markets in 1899, after formal clinical
trials.
- Felix Hoffman and the Bayer-company however were not the first ones who managed to manufacture acetylsalicylic acid. Forty years before Felix Hoffman, a French chemist Charles Frederick Gerhardt had managed to create acetylsalicylic acid, but even as the product worked, he had no desire to market his invention and finally he abandoned the whole product. Gerhardt has been forgotten many times in the pages of history, as Bayer was the first one to patent acetylsalicylic acid on 3rd March 1899, under the trade name of Aspirin.
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