Ooooh, hello dear English
speaking-reading-hearing listener, welcome back to me, @sciencemug,
the blog/podcast/twitter&instagram accounts which tells you science
stories while thinking of opening an agency for nape models and
ant-sitters, aaand which talks to you thanks to the voice kidnapped
via a voodoo-wireless trick, from a veeery very very dumb dude.
Aaand
which does all of this in Eng?ish, a language that is
to proper English what a sidereal leap on carbon sequestration
technology is to something less than vital to your species as right
now.
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Today
is the birthday of a tablet of which about 50 billion are swallowed
each year worldwide (1).
So today I will tell you the story of its genesis. Of the birth of
Aspirin.
Aspirin 3D pic is a Public Domain image adapted by @sciencemug (source: wikia.com) |
Aspirin
is acetylsalicylic acid.
Well, to be more precise, “Aspirin” is the first commercial name of a medication which active principle is acetylsalicylic acid.
Aspirin
is first put on the market by Bayer
in 1899 (P),
but “the first sample
of pure acetylsalicylic acid [is
prepared] on 10 August
1897”
(P)
by Doctor
Felix Hoffmann,
a “chemist in the
pharmaceutical laboratory of the [then]
German dye manufacturer Friedrich Bayer & Co in Elberfeld”
(P).
The official story goes that Hoffman’s dad suffers from rheumatism, and asks his chemistry savvy son to create something better than the medicine he is presently taking, the sodium salicycate, since that drug has heavy side effects such as gastric irritation, nausea and tinnitus (which is the annoying ringing ear) (P).
Felix,
then, consults “the chemical
literature[, comes] across
the synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid”
(P),
and, as above stated, makes it.
So
this is what it is on the matter, and it’s all based on the account
of “a footnote in a history
of chemical engineering” (P)
written in 1934 by Albrecht
Schmidt, “a chemist [...]
retired from IG Farbenindustrie—the organization into which F Bayer
& Co had been incorporated in 1925”
(P).
Felix Hoffmann pic is a Public Domain image adapted by @sciencemug (source: wikia.com) |
The
actual facts, however, are