A headache can leave you feeling bare. Or make you behave like a bear. Sometimes, they are completely unbearable.
It is a good thing there’s Bayer. Yes, good old Bayer aspirin, with the forever familiar yellow and brown label. It has a birthday today. The German company Bayer patented aspirin on March 6, 1899.
These days, aspirin is the most common drug in household medicine cabinets. The technical term for this is acetylsalicylic acid. Aspirin is much easier to say, although I knew a girl in school who pronounced it Ass Burn.
I learned today that it was originally made from a chemical found in the bark of willow trees. The weeping willow. Apropos. We weep when we have headaches.
The active ingredient in its raw form is called salicin. This stuff goes back a long, long time. It has been used for many centuries. Good old Hippocrates used it to relieve pain and fever. I wonder how they ever happened upon this. “Oh, let’s strip this willow tree of its bark and see what it does for my tennis elbow. I have to play Socrates later today.” Anyway, this substance was very hard on the stomach, and it was nasty-bad-bitter, since way back when.
But eventually, a better form of salicin was developed, which tasted better, and was slightly better on the tum-tum. This was done by a good fellow, who worked for the Bayer Company. His name was Felix Hoffmann. But was it really Felix who did the work? There is evidence that shows Hoffmann’s work was really done by a Jewish chemist. His name was Arthur Eichengrun. His contributions were covered up, years later, during that awful Nazi era.
Back to Bayer. They came up with the brand name this way. The “a” stands for acetyl, the “spir” is from the spirea plant (a source of salicin) and the suffix “in,” commonly used for medications. Aspirin. It wasn’t long before it became the number-one drug worldwide.
Aspirin was made available in tablet form and without a prescription in 1915. There were a lot of passes back and forth with the patent and “rights” to this. But Bayer came up with the original. To help relieve headaches and other pains.
Those headaches are strange things if you ask me. Especially migraines, which I suffer from. I say they are peculiar because they make it feel like your brain is exploding. But brains can’t feel pain. Well, not physical pain. Mental anguish is an entirely different matter.
But as it goes, most headaches happen in the nerves, blood vessels, and muscles that cover a person’s head and neck. There are a whole big lot of those in our noggins, I can assure you. Sometimes the muscles or blood vessels swell, for a variety of different reasons. They tighten or get grumpy. And that is what stimulates the surrounding nerves and puts pressure on them. Those nerves then send a rush of pain “messages” to the brain. And there we have the headache.
Which we bear. Which brings us to Bayer. Aspirin.
May your day today, be free of the need for any such intervention.
Especially ass burn.
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“One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.”
― Sophocles
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“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
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“Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.”
― Neil Gaiman
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