Willow Bark Relieves Pain and Fever
"The old folk remedy of chewing or brewing willow bark to ease pain and bring down a fever."
Sumerian clay tablets from around 4,000 years ago already link willow with pain relief, and the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus (c. 1500 BC) documents its use for pain and inflammation. Willow bark contains salicin, the natural compound that is chemically the direct ancestor of aspirin, once absorbed by the body it converts into salicylic acid, the same pathway modern aspirin works through. The line to modern medicine runs through the English vicar Edward Stone, who spent five years in the 1750s-60s treating fevers with dried, powdered willow bark, and on to Italian and German chemists who isolated and named salicin in the 1820s. One popular detail doesn't hold up, though: the widely repeated claim that Hippocrates specifically recommended chewing willow bark for pain. The one surviving reference to willow in the works attributed to him describes burning willow leaves as smoke for an entirely different purpose.