Hippocrates and willow bark? What you know about the history of aspirin may be wrong

Aspirin is one of the world's most widely used drugs, its main ingredients come from plants such as willows and peaches, the natural product of salicin, in addition, aspirin is a good example of ancient medical myths, its origins with the famous ancient Greek doctors, known as Hippocrates, the "father of medicine", is closely related, and is said to have used willows to help treat human body pain, which helped promote the use and development of aspirin centuries later, but his work rarely mentions willows, so why do we still believe in this myth? Virtually every history of aspirin tells us that Hippocrates prescribes willows to mothers, and of course some say he prescribes willow tea, and some say he lets mothers chew willow bark;
Photo Source: The bark and leaves of raw Pixel/Public Domain willows are often used as an ancient drug, but these drugs are often used externally rather than internally, because ancient measurement systems were so confusing and sometimes completely non-available in formulations that it was difficult to determine whether there was enough salgon in the ancient formula to work.
hippocrates may mention the bark of white willows, but there may not be many salgates in the bark of white willows compared to other plants such as willows and peaches.
the body may have difficulty obtaining a clinically effective dose of sage glycoside at 60-120 mg by chewing white willow bark or drinking willow tea alone.
White willow also contains toxic and bitter-flavoured tuna, which can make it difficult for people to ingest enough bark or tea to reach this dose, and can also cause stomach pain, and natural salgon is more abundant in other ancient plants, such as peach trees, but even so, when the body ingests enough plants to relieve pain, it can still cause terrible stomach pain. dioscorides, an
physician, is an ancient Roman who has written a drug guide that is still in print today, in which he describes willow as a good medicine for stomach pain and tuberculosis, a respiratory disease, as well as as as a contraceptive.
He says that if you burn the willow bark and soak it in vinegar, and then apply it to the body's horns and cocoons, it will effectively remove the horns and cocoons, and he recommends using a hot bag containing willow leaves to help treat gluten, now commonly known as arthritis.
Celsus, another Roman medic, says warm willow bags or creams can be used to treat uterine or intestinal drooping, and he recommends pushing the drooping organs back and applying them to the outside with warm dressings containing willow leaves.
If willow bark and willow leaves are more convenient painkillers, humans are now almost in desperate need, and in early modern Europe, willow leaves are largely considered useless drugs.
this does not mean that willows are actually useless, they still contain saloids, but they are a modern form that has not yet been separated or refined.
Then the English priest Edward Stone rediscovered aspirin, and around 1757 he chewed the white willow bark out of curiosity, and he was shocked by the bitterness of the white willow bark, so he wondered if the white willow bark could look like a bitter golden chicken bark (to treat malaria) The source of the drug quinine is used for medicinal purposes; Edward Stone collects and drys about half a kilogram of willow bark, grinds it into powder, then takes a small dose of willow bark every four hours to help de-burn, and drying the bark allows salyan to concentrate and enhance its potions.
when he discovered that the powder seemed to ease his fever, Edward Stone tried it when his parishioners were ill, and in 1763 he wrote to the Royal Society to say that the willow bark powder could work.
is a plant extract transformed into aspirin? Researchers Brugnatelli and Fontana from Italy successfully extracted saligen from the bark of the willow tree in 1826, and then the German pharmacologist Johann Andreas Buchner coined the name salicin from the Latin word "salix" in 1828.
Then Felix Hoffmann, a researcher at Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Germany, chemically modified the related salithyric acid molecules and eventually named them "aspirin", while Bayer filed a patent for aspirin in 1899.
aspirin is now widely used for pain relief, swelling, cooling and prevention of blood clots in the body.
why do people keep repeating the myth of the willow tree? Researchers keep repeating the myth that the ancients understood the link between willow and salyanide to relieve pain, in part because everyone loved an epic story, and the story of aspirin, with a little imagination, could be turned into a story, and we all knew that willows contained salgine, which helped relieve pain in the body, so when we found out that the ancients mentioned willow, we thought that the ancients discovered sorghum earlier than modern people.
Modern medicine likes to have a respectable genealogy tree that also helps to give us a very good pedigree of today's manufactured products, which we also consider safe and effective and can be a key part of the long-term treatment of diseases.
but there are a lot of holes in the ancient history of aspirin, so the next time you eat aspirin, thank Hoffman instead of Hippocrates.
: salicin 2 Willow Bark 3 Willow Bark: Nature's Aspirin 4 Locating traditional plant knowledge in household recipes: Part 3 (5) Hippocrates and Will Barkow? What you know about the history of aspirin is probably wrong by The Conversation This article is from Bio Valley, for more information please download Bio Valley APP (