Historically Speaking: Aspirin, a Pioneering Wonder Drug

The winding, millennia-long route from bark to Bayer.

The Wall Street Journal

February 1, 2024

For ages the most reliable medical advice was also the most simple: Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. This cheap pain reliever, which also thins blood and reduces inflammation, has been a medicine cabinet staple ever since it became available over the counter nearly 110 years ago.

Willow bark, a distant ancestor of aspirin, was a popular ingredient in ancient remedies to relieve pain and treat skin problems. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was a firm believer in willow’s curative powers. For women with gynecological troubles in the fourth century B.C., he advised burning the leaves “until the steam enters the womb.”

That willow bark could reduce fevers wasn’t discovered until the 18th century. Edward Stone, an English clergyman, noticed its extremely bitter taste was similar to that of the cinchona tree, the source of the costly malaria drug quinine. Stone dried the bark and dosed himself to treat a fever. When he felt better, he tested the powder on others suffering from “ague,” or malaria. When their fevers disappeared, he reported triumphantly to the Royal Society in 1763 that he had found another malaria cure. In fact, he had identified a way to treat its symptoms.

Willows contain salicin, a plant hormone with anti-inflammatory, fever-reducing and pain-relieving properties. Experiments with salicin, and its byproduct salicylic acid, began in earnest in Europe in the 1820s. In 1853 Charles Frédéric Gerhardt, a French chemist, discovered how to create acetylsalicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, but then abandoned his research and died young.

There is some debate over how aspirin became a blockbuster drug for the German company Bayer. Its official history credits Felix Hoffmann, a Bayer chemist, with synthesizing acetylsalicylic acid in 1897 in the hopes of alleviating his father’s severe rheumatic pain. Bayer patented aspirin in 1899 and by 1918 it had become one of the most widely used drugs in the world.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

But did Hoffman work alone? Shortly before his death in 1949, Arthur Eichengrün, a Jewish chemist who had spent World War II in a concentration camp, published a paper claiming that Bayer had erased his contribution. In 2000 the BMJ published a study supporting Eichengrün’s claim. Bayer, which became part of the Nazi-backing conglomerate I.G. Farben in 1925, has denied that Eichengrün had a role in the breakthrough.

Aspirin shed its associations with the Third Reich after I.G. Farben sold off Bayer in the early 1950s, but the drug’s pain-relieving hegemony was fleeting. By 1956 Bayer’s British affiliate brought acetaminophen to the market. Ibuprofen became available in 1962.

The drug’s fortunes recovered after the New England Journal of Medicine published a study in 1989 that found the pill reduced the threat of a heart attack by 44%. Some public-health officials promptly encouraged anyone over 50 to take a daily aspirin as a preventive measure.

But as with the case with Rev. Stone, it seems the science is more complicated. In 2022 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force officially advised against taking the drug prophylactically, given the risk of internal bleeding and the availability of other therapies. Aspirin may work wonders, but it can’t work miracles.

WSJ Historically Speaking: Undying Defeat: The Power of Failed Uprisings

From the Warsaw Ghetto to the Alamo, doomed rebels live on in culture

John Wayne said that he saw the Alamo as ‘a metaphor for America’. PHOTO: ALAMY

Earlier this month, Israel commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. The annual Remembrance Day of the Holocaust and Heroism, as it is called, reminds Israelis of the moral duty to fight to the last.

The Warsaw ghetto battle is one of many doomed uprisings across history that have cast their influence far beyond their failures, providing inspiration to a nation’s politics and culture.

Nearly 500,000 Polish Jews once lived in the ghetto. By January 1943, the Nazis had marked the surviving 55,000 for deportation. The Jewish Fighting Organization had just one machine gun and fewer than a hundred revolvers for a thousand or so sick and starving volunteer soldiers. The Jews started by blowing up some tanks and fought on until May 16. The Germans executed 7,000 survivors and deported the rest.

For many Jews, the rebellion offered a narrative of resistance, an alternative to the grim story of the fortress of Masada, where nearly 1,000 besieged fighters chose suicide over slavery during the First Jewish-Roman War (A.D. 66–73).
The story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising has also entered the wider culture. The title of Leon Uris’s 1961 novel “Mila 18” comes from the street address of the headquarters of the Jewish resistance in their hopeless fight. Four decades later, Roman Polanski made the uprising a crucial part of his 2002 Oscar-winning film, “The Pianist,” whose musician hero aids the effort.

Other doomed uprisings have also been preserved in art. The 48-hour Paris Uprising of 1832, fought by 3,000 insurrectionists against 30,000 regular troops, gained immortality through Victor Hugo, who made the revolt a major plot point in “Les Misérables” (1862). The novel was a hit on its debut and ever after—and gave its world-wide readership a set of martyrs to emulate.

Even a young country like the U.S. has its share of national myths, of desperate last stands serving as touchstones for American identity. One has been the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 during the War of Texas Independence. “Remember the Alamo” became the Texan war cry only weeks after roughly 200 ill-equipped rebels, among them the frontiersman Davy Crockett, were killed defending the Alamo mission in San Antonio against some 2,000 Mexican troops.

The Alamo’s imagery of patriotic sacrifice became popular in novels and paintings but really took off during the film era, beginning in 1915 with the D.W. Griffith production, “Martyrs of the Alamo.” Walt Disney got in on the act with his 1950s TV miniseries, “ Davy Crockett : King of the Wild Frontier.” John Wayne’s 1960 “The Alamo,” starring Wayne as Crockett, immortalized the character for a generation.

Wayne said that he saw the Alamo as “a metaphor of America” and its will for freedom. Others did too, even in very different contexts. During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson, whose hometown wasn’t far from San Antonio, once told the National Security Council why he believed U.S. troops needed to be fighting in Southeast Asia: “Hell,” he said, “Vietnam is just like the Alamo.”