[From the willow to aspirin].

At the beginning was the willow bark, which was considered as a medicine by Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Plinus. During the XVIIIth century, the Reverend Edward Stone re-discovered the willow for the cure of agues. In 1829, the french pharmacist Pierre Joseph Leroux isolated salicin. Raffaelle Piria was the first to synthesize salicylic acid from salicin (salicoside). Hermann Kolbe prepared salicylic acid from sodium phenate and carbon dioxide. And then acetylsalicylic acid was first prepared by Charles Gerhardt in 1853, but he did not succeed in identifying its structure. Felix Hoffmann, Arthur Eichengrun and Heinrich Dresen from Bayer Laboratories were at the origin of the use of Aspirin as a medicine. In 1971, John Vane showed that aspirin-like drugs inhibited prostaglandine synthesis.