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A Yahoo! search on "aspirin history" proved effective. The results led straight to 20th Century Wonder, a site about aspirin created as a high school chemistry project. Not exactly a definitive source, nevertheless it presents a basic history and a useful bibliography of links. In 1897, Felix Hoffmann, a German chemist employed by Bayer, came across an earlier recipe for a gentle analgesic. Seeking to relieve his father's arthritis pain, Hoffmann used French chemist Charles Frederic
Gerhardt's 1853 research to synthesize acetylsalicylic acid (ASA), a compound less acidic and easier on the stomach than its predecessor, sodium salicylate. In 1899, the product was named aspirin and, after extensive testing, Bayer began marketing it successfully in powder form. The active ingredient of aspirin, salicin, has been prescribed since the 5th century B.C., when Greek physician Hippocrates treated aches and pains, fevers, and inflammations with a bitter powder extracted from willow bark. It wasn't until the 1970s that British researcher John Vane described the precise way aspirin works -- by blocking the production of hormone-like substances
known as prostoglandins, which are released in response to human tissue injury. For a follow-up dose of reading, we recommend one Useless Information page about this century-old wonder drug, and an "Aspirin" article from Scientific American that illustrates the workings of the world's most widely used drug and how it differs from other anti-inflammatories.
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