The uncertain origins of aspirin | Hacker News Reader

The uncertain origins of aspirin

asimov.press

66 pointsdearwell17 comments

This was a great read but I took issue with this a bit:

"When researchers gave people willow bark extract corresponding to 240 mg of salicin, then looked at how much salicylic acid was present in their blood over time, it was the equivalent of taking 87 mg of aspirin (300 mg to 600 mg is recommended per dose, with up to 3600 mg allowed per day). Notably, 240 mg of salicin is the recommended daily dose specified by the European Scientific Cooperative on Phytotherapy...

If... each cup of tea provided 240 mg salicin (possible with a good steeping and a high salicin content in the bark), then one would need to drink 41 cups of tea to get a full, therapeutic aspirin dose of 3600 mg."

Wouldn't you only need around 4 cups to get a full dose? That seems not unreasonable to me. The 10L would be to get the maximum safe dose, which seems like a different thing.

It's relevant because it's a primary argument the author uses to dismiss willow use in older times (even as they point to similar use later as eventually motivating the discovery of aspirin even later).

Yeah, that is two different things.

And 240mg is right under the lower end of the recommended dose.

So, two cups?

Or more likely, “drink this until you start to feel better”.

> Wouldn't you only need around 4 cups to get a full dose? That seems not unreasonable to me.

This depends entirely on how bitter it is. There are certainly root bark teas you can brew that will induce vomiting before completing 4 cups.

You don't need 3600mg of aspirin for a therapeutic dose, more like 300mg

Yes, that is indeed the point being made in the comment you replied to.

Aspirin isn't salicylic acid; they are close relatives. Aspirin replaces an -OH group in salicylic acid with a -COOCH3 acetyl ester.

Someone chewing on or otherwise consuming willow bark extracts isn't taking aspirin.

The author couldn't find a purported willow text in the ancient Egyptian Ebers papyrus that was quoted by John Mann, so he threw his hands in the air and moved on.

But Mann made a mistake. The book he was likely quoting from, 'Science and Secrets of Early Medicine' by Jurgen Thorwald (which, to be fair, is not referenced at all by Mann) does mention the Ebers papyrus in the paragraph after the quote (on pp. 57-8 for people playing along at home) but the willow quote itself in the paragraph before turns out to be from the Edwin Smith Papyrus, Case 41 to be exact. It can be read here:

https://archive.org/details/oip3_20220624/page/374/

So that quoted willow did exist in ancient Egypt.

The commentary on the translation also illustrates the pitfalls of learning about ancient medicine from medical treatises of the time, discussing the word ḏrḏ: "The rendering “leaves” is not wholly certain; the word might possibly mean “bark” (cortex), and indeed in the case of willow, the bark is medicinally more efficacious than the leaves."

If you use modern medical knowledge to inform the translation (and interpret the phrase "the feathers of birds and the ḏrḏr.w of trees" elsewhere as referring to how trees are covered in bark just as birds are covered in feathers; see commentary on this dictionary entry: https://tla.digital/lemma/185150 ) you potentially get a more accurate translation, but you cannot treat it as independent evidence for the use of willow bark as opposed to willow leaves. Hopefully at least the identity of the willow tree has been established in a less circular manner.

One quibble I have with the piece is the quotes.

        There is a bark of an Englifh tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful aftringent, and very efficacious in curing aguifh [agues] and intermitting diforders.


        My curiofity prompted me to look into the difpenfatories and books of botany, and examine what they faid concerning it; but there it exifted only by name. I could not find, that it hath, or ever had, any place in pharmacy, or any fuch qualities, as I fufpected afcribed to it by the botanifts.

If (as it appears) the author was unable to type in a long-S, he could at least have used a normal one, making the text more readable.

i.e. Englifh => English; aftringent => astringent; aguifh => aguish; diforders => disorders; curiofity => curiosity; difpenfatories => dispensatories; faid => said; exifted => existed; fuch => such; fufpected afcribed => suspected ascribed; botanifts => botanists

I certainly bought the ancient remedy story. Getting wised up doesn't diminish the amazing work done with willow, and chinchona bark. Obrien writes of 'jesuits bark' a lot in his naval fiction, makes me wonder now how much the Georgian british navy did actually use this kind of thing for fever reduction.

On the whole, I'm going to give blowing willow smoke up my Anus a miss, if that's ok.

ggm sez >"I'm going to give blowing willow smoke up my Anus a miss, if that's ok. "<

Speaking of which, here lie several drawings of people blowing smoke up a miss's ass FWIW:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/blowing-smoke-up-your-ass

While more hygienic than mouth-to-mouth resuscitation + CPR, I suspect legal complications would render the technique non-preferred today.

BTW the lady depicted in the first drawing has few, if any, clothing undergarments for a married woman of the year 1746. Indeed for any woman, any year.

"Even if you could push through the bitterness, it’s unlikely you’d be able to stomach the bucketfuls of tea required to get enough salicin from willow bark (or similar plants) to ease your discomfort."

So, rather than killing pain, they probably just stopped complaining about it to save them from having to drink any more bitter willow tea.

The only urban legend I heard about the origins of aspirin is that it was originally snorted, hence the name.

Allow me to clarify: in french, "aspire in" could mean "snort it in", though in a goofy brand-name-ified sort of way. This is something that my french high school chemistry teacher served the entire class in the most serious way possible.

"Aspirate" is also an English word which just means to breath something in. Sounds medical (so not generally used) but not in an awkward brand-namey way.

As an aside, this is an example of why I always take history with a grain of salt. All historical knowledge is akin to LLM, most of it is hallucinated. The actual evidence is often meeger, contested, incomplete, hearsay, hard to understand the intent and meaning, and so on.

>When I searched through a translation of the papyrus, however, I saw no evidence of willow bark used similarly to aspirin. I did find a treatment for an “ear-that-discharges-foul-smelling-matter” that used “berry-of-the-willow”

These two sentences critically contradict one another, unless you assume the translations to be perfect (we know for sure they are not). It appears very likely that they knew. The hypothesis that they didn't know, then, appears to be incredibly unlikely and therefore disproven without significant evidence to the contrary.

I think the article could have ended here, in the spirit of an honest science based approach to history. But it didn't.

This is a science fiction article, presented as a real ground breaking contribution to a historical subject.

There is no uncertainty about the origin of Aspirin whatosever.

A young chemist named Felix Hoffman synthesized it in 1897. The name aspirin was settled upon in January 1899, between the two finalists euspirin and aspirin.

All use of salycilates in natural form until then was quackery and not the origin of the thing called Aspirin.

Salycilates that are not ASA are not aspirin.

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