MEDICAL MIRACLE AND MYSTERY: 100 Years Of

-ASPIRIN dates back thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians took dried myrtle leaves to treat muscle pains. Hippocrates, the Greek father of modern medicine, recommended willow bark tea to ease the pain of childbirth. Both these contain salicyclic acid – aspirin’s main ingredient.

– REV Edward Stone, a clergyman from Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, conducted the drug’s first clinical trials in 1763. He gave willow bark extract to 50 patients suffering from fever and reported positive results.

Sodium salicyclate, an early version of aspirin, was made in 1859. However, it made patients vomit and corroded the mouth, throat and stomach.

– THE Ger-mans were the first to create aspirin as we know it. Felix Hoffman, a 29-year-old at pharmaceuticals company Bayer, is credited with inventing the compound in 1897. He was inspired to devise the formula by his arthritic father. Hoffman Senior was the first person to try the new pill.

– ASPIRIN was an immediate success after it was given its brand name in 1899. It was the first medicine to be sold as a tablet instead of a powder and became available in the UK in 1905.

The name comes from its ingredients – the a is for acetyl, the spir from spiraea ulmaria.

– HOFFMAN’S discovery nearly never made the shelves after Bayer executive Heinrich Dreser declared it “worthless” when it was unsuccessfully used on the hearts of frogs. He was more interested in another wonder-drug which it was claimed made the user feel “heroic”. It was named heroin and tested on babies.

-HOFFMAN never profited from inventing aspirin because the main ingredient was already known. He retired to Switzerland to study art history. Dreser made a fortune.

-SOME historians believe aspirin’s real inventor was Hoffman’s boss, Arthur Eichengrun. They claim the Nazis later covered up his find because he was Jewish.

– BAYER founded the Bayer Leverkusen football team in 1904 in its home town of the same name. The firm still owns the aspirin trademark in 80 countries – but not for Britain, France or the US, The Treaty of Versailles in the wake of First World War took away their rights to the name.

-THE first movie pictures many people saw were aspirin adverts. Bayer sent trucks with film projectors and loudspeakers around the world between the two world wars advertising the drug.

IT has been claimed the trucks were later plastered with swastikas after the company became part of the IG Farben conglomerate, which supplied lethal Zyklon B gas to concentration camps.

-ASPIRIN was the world’s No 1 medicine by 1950. But it was overtaken within a decade because of a major side-effect was discovered – the medical miracle caused bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract of six per cent of patients.

-IN the 70s Sir John Vane, a chemist at St Barth-olomew’s hospital in London, realised it reduced blood clotting as well as relieving pain. He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1982 for his discovery.

– IT might save human lives but aspirin is fatal to Doctor Who. A single tablet can exterminate the Time Lord.

– PEOPLE consume 100 billion aspirin tablets around the world each year.

It is the active ingredient in more than 50 over-the-counter medications. The Irish prefer theirs dissolved, the Americans neck the tablets whole and the Italians have them fizzy. The French like to take them as suppositories.

– ASPIRIN is also used to treat strokes, thromboses, dementia, cataracts, blindness and hangovers. It may reduce the risk of some cancers.

Studies have also found it can double the chances of an IVF pregnancy. Its blood-thinning properties have seen it prescribed before long-haul flights to prevent deep-vein thrombosis.

-THE mystery of how aspirin actually works has never been answered and it remains the most researched drug in medical history.

– AN aspirin a day cuts the risk of a heart attack by a third. It is estimated this could save 100,000 lives across the world each year. Doctors also recommend taking a single tablet after a heart attack.

-A 1998 survey found 80 per cent of people knew it cut the risk of heart attacks, but only 10 per cent of men and eight per cent of women were actually taking it.

-SOMEONE who has taken aspirin will bleed from a pinprick for three minutes longer than someone who has not, as researcher Harvey Weiss discovered in the 60s.

-US mind-reader Marc Salem predict-ed Elvis’s death four days before it happened. Witnessed by a lawyer, he placed his prediction inside an aspirin box which was baked into a pretzel.

– GARDENERS use salicylic acid, aspirin’s active component, to cure diseases that kill irises and other plants.

-RESEARCHERS from New York’s University of Medicine questioned 15,000 women about their aspirin use and discovered that those who used the drug were up to half as likely to develop cancer. It seems likely that doctors could begin prescribing aspirin to patients with a high risk of developing cancer.

– NORWICH City Football Club fans have nicknamed their team manager Nigel Worthington “Aspirin” – because they see him as the answer to their headaches.

– PEOPLE over 50 can expect to live longer by taking a daily aspirin. A study by researchers in Swansea showed that people who pop a pill a day after turning 50 have their prospects of reaching 70 increased by 30 per cent.

-NEIL Armstrong took some with him to the moon in 1969 to combat muscle pains and the headaches suffered by the Apollo crew.IT is the wonder-drug used to treat everything from hangovers to heart attacks – and we have now been swallowing aspirin for a century.

Since 1905, when the painkiller first went on sale, we have been relying on the miracle medicine to keep us on our feet.

Its history links two world wars, a role in the development of class A drugs and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.

Small wonder that revolutionary Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset dubbed the 20th century The Age Of Aspirin.

But for all its life-saving properties, scientists still do not understand exactly how the tablets work.

Here, we look back at how aspirin kept us going through the past 100 years – and why we are still relying on medicine’s bitter pill after all this time.