Calling Dr. Tree!

Have you seen your parents complain about a headache, then reach for a bottle of pain-killing pills (adults only!)? Or maybe your grandparents suffer from joint pain and do the same? We use these medicines when we’re hurting, but one might not exist if a man hadn’t chewed on a tree centuries ago.

It’s true!

In 1758, Edward Stone took a walk one warm, summer morning through the busy town where he lived in England. He kept going until he reached some land he owned. He stopped to rest under a willow tree. While he was there, he decided to chew on a bit of willow bark (although he never explained why). The bark’s bitter taste reminded him of a medicine made from the cinchona tree.

Stone wasn’t a doctor. He worked for the church, but he was also interested in science. He knew cinchona trees grew far away in South America. The medicine that was made from them was expensive. But willow trees grew all around England. Stone wondered if the willow tree could also be used to make medicine.

He gathered up twigs and cut some bark from the tree. He dried them for several weeks on top of an oven. Then Stone ground up the twigs and bark and mixed them in a drink. He tried it himself, and he gave some to people who had aches and pains. Stone tested his willow bark mixture on 50 people over 5 years. It helped them all feel better. Stone wrote about his discovery.

Edward Stone wasn’t the first to learn how to use willow bark. People around the world had been using it for thousands of years. Willow trees grow in Africa, Europe, Asia, North America and South America. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans used medicine made from willow bark to ease pain. So did Indigenous peoples from South Africa to North America. Willow bark had also been used in England, but Stone was the first person to test it using scientific methods and write about it.

Years passed before willow bark was studied again. In the 1800s, scientists around the world were curious about how medicines worked, especially those made from plants. They had better tools than when Stone did his experiments. Some decided to study why willow bark helped people. It took years, but they figured out which part of willow bark blocks pain. The next step was to find a way to make it in a lab. They wanted a way that would be easier and cheaper than grinding up tree bark.

In 1888, the Bayer company in Germany was looking for new medicines to sell. The company hired a team of scientists. They studied how to use chemicals like the ones in willow bark. They worked on a medicine for nearly 10 years. Finally, on August 10, 1897, they figured it out. The company named the new medicine “aspirin.”

Soon the whole world was taking aspirin to help pain. It was easy to make in a lab, so it wasn’t expensive. And the medicine worked. Aspirin may be the most-used pain reliever in history. And it all started with a tree.