The History of Aspirin

I wrote on another blog about the origin of the word "aspirin."  I'm repurposing some of that here because it is an interesting bit of chemistry and marketing history.

The German pharmaceutical company Friedrich Bayer received a patent for Aspirin in 1899. It was once probably the most ubiquitous of nonprescription drugs. It is probably not as popular today as people use over-the-counter pain relievers that are less irritating to your stomach.

Like many drugs, aspirin was found in a plant - the bark of the willow tree. Attempts to synthesize a version were underway by many international companies. 

The pain-relieving aspect was not new at all. Willow and meadowsweet were used as pain remedies by the Sumerians and Egyptians as early as 3000 BCE. 

The Greek physician Hippocrates reported giving willow-leaf tea to women in the throes of childbirth to help ease their labor pains.

In 1783, an English clergyman named Edward Stone wrote a letter to the Royal Society to say that he had much success in relieving ague and fever in his parishioners by giving them dried white willow bark. 

In 1828, a German pharmacy professor isolated the active ingredient in willow bark and named the bitter yellow crystals “salicin,” after the Latin name for white willow — Salix alba. 

But extracting the salicin from plants was difficult, and required a large amount of plant matter to produce the necessary quantity. A synthetic version became the goal. 

A German chemist named Hermann Kolbe first synthesized salicylic acid in 1860, but in 1895, a Bayer chemist named Felix Hoffmann was given the task of developing a “new and improved” synthetic salicylic acid product. 

Hoffmann's father had rheumatism but couldn’t take salicylic acid without vomiting because it irritated his stomach, so his study found that combining an acetyl group with salicylic acid would yield a gentler product. He came up with an effective synthetic version in 1897.

Bayer sought a patent for the brand name Aspirin: “A” for acetylsalicylic acid, the synthetic compound developed by Hoffmann; “-spir” for Spiraea ulmaria, or meadowsweet, which was a botanical source of salicylic acid; and “-in” because it was a common suffix for drugs at that time. By 1950, it was the best-selling pain reliever in the world.