Who invented Aspirin?

Felix Hoffman, 1899

Who invented Aspirin? The world’s most widely used medical drug is probably aspirin, known scientifically as acetylsalicylic acid. In an unrefined form, it was found in traditional portions made from the bark of the white willow tree (Salix Alba, hence the scientific name) and other plants. Aspirin is versatile. It reduces pain and lowers fever, particularly by affecting vital body chemicals called prostaglandins. In recent times aspirin has been found to thin the blood, reducing the risk of strokes and heart disease. In high doses it gives relief from arthritis.

History of Invention:

An early form of the drug, salicylic acid, was extracted from plants as the beginning of the 19^th century, but because of its severe side effects, little interest was shown until 1897, when Felix Hoffman and a colleague at the large German chemical firm Bayer discovered how to make acetylsalicylic acid, a form of the chemical that did not exist in nature and had fewer side effects. The first patient was Hoffman’s own father, who suffered severely from arthritis and could not tolerate straight salicylic acid.

Bayer patented the drug in 1899; the modern pharmaceutical industry was born. Although another company was already selling it, and a French chemist had devised a similar form 40 years earlier but Bayer was first to mass produce the drug. During world war- I various countries devised ways to make the drug synthetically, from the chemical phenol found in coal tar. In Australia, the result was called Aspro.

At the time aspirin came into use, the only other antipyretics (drugs to reduce fever) came from the bark of the cinchona tree, along with the anti-malarial quinine. Supplies of the bark ran short in the 1880s and the hunt was soon on for alternatives. This quickly led to the identification of the antipyretic phenacetin and then of paracetamol, though the latter’s importance was not recognized for half a century. Not until the 1950s was paracetamol on the market, known as Tylenol in the USA and Panadol in the UK, where it was at first available only on prescription.

Between them, aspirin and paracetamol have fixed a lot of headaches and high temperatures; our lives would have been very different without them.