The Ebers papyrus, a collection of 877 medicinal recipes from the middle of the second millennium BC, recommended an infusion of dried myrtle leaves for rheumatic and back pains. The active ingredient: salicylic acid.
About a thousand years later, Hippocrates (of the oath), prescribed a juice extracted from the bark of the willow tree for fever and pain, and for labour pains. The active ingredient: L salicyclic acid (its name is derived from the Latin word for willow: salix).The active ingredient in aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid, was synthesised for the first time in a chemically pure and stable form in 1897 by a young chemist, Dr Flix Hoffman, working for Bayer.
Today, if the quantity of acetylsalicyclic acid manufactured annually was pressed into 500mg tablets, they would stretch from the earth to the moon and back. Source: BayerHealthvillage online (www.aspirin.com)