Bayer

Aspirin, for example, was derived in the 19th century from salicylic acid, a long-time remedy for pains and fever found in plants like willow and meadowsweet. It was developed and marketed by the German company Bayer.

In the Seventeen-Hundreds, people used willow bark to reduce a sick person's high body temperature. In Eighteen-Sixty, researchers at the Bayer Company in Germany copied the salicylic acid found in willow bark. They created acetyl salicylic acid. They called it aspirin, for the spirea plant which also contains the natural chemical. Aspirin first was made into its present pill form about one-hundred years ago.

So, how did aspirin become so important? The story begins with a willow tree. Two thousand years ago, the Greek doctor Hippocrates advised his patients to chew on the bark and leaves of the willow. The tree contains the chemical salicin. In the 1800s, researchers discovered how to make salicylic acid from salicin. In 1897, a chemist named Felix Hoffmann at Friedrich Bayer and Company in Germany created acetyl salicylic acid. Later, it became the active substance in a medicine that Bayer called aspirin.