People dropped whisky into their noses to treat Spanish flu. Here’s what else they took that would raise eyebrows today

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Philippa Martyr, The University of Western AustraliaWe’re researching COVID-19 in a fast-paced world with new data becoming available all the time. We track which interventions work well and which ones don’t.

But in 1918, during the Spanish flu pandemic, the world was a different place. No one was entirely sure what caused influenza. By the time health authorities began to find out, it was too late.

Our knowledge about viruses was limited in 1918, but we knew about bacteria. People who died of flu had bacterial infection in their lungs. However, this threw researchers off track because these were secondary infections, not caused directly by the flu.

With this lack of knowledge, it was still an anything-goes medical research world. There were unregulated vaccine trials and lots of hype for the latest “cure”, even in respectable medical journals.

More than 100 years on, controversial “cures” for COVID-19, such as ivermectin, are making the headlines, being reported in medical journals and are being promoted by doctors and politicians.

Here’s what we know about the Spanish flu “cures” of the day, whisky included.

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Doctors, pharmacists and nurses had cures

Doctors developed and used some of these cures for the flu. Sydney’s chief quarantine officer, Dr Reid, treated patients in March 1919 with 15-grain (1 gram) doses of calcium lactate every four hours, and a “vaccine” containing influenza and pneumococcus bacteria. In 203 cases, he had no deaths.

Calcium lactate is used today to treat low levels of calcium in the blood. But Dr Reid’s doses are well above the current recommended daily level.

J R A McAlister’s treatment ‘cures influenza at once’.
Trove Digitised Newspapers, Guyra Argus, September 11, 1919, p2, National Library of Australia

Chemists were also busy making and selling their own influenza cures. J. Reginald Albert McAlister of Guyra in regional New South Wales advertised his 1919 patented mixture as curing influenza at once.

People even listened to nurses — who at the time were usually the least important people in the health-care system — about cures for the Spanish flu.

Nan Taylor, a New Zealand nurse, advocated whisky — lots of it, including gargling and drops up the nose. She also recommended quinine and castor oil.

Nurse Kate Guazzini cared for Spanish flu patients in South Africa in late 1918, and caught the flu there before moving to Sydney. She said:

I was kept alive on brandy and milk for six weeks […] That, with quinine and hot lemon drinks, were found to be the only effective remedies.

Food manufacturers linked themselves to flu cures. In 1919 a brand new beef extract, Bonox, had just hit the Australian market, and the flu epidemic was a great marketing opportunity. Bonox was advertised as a sure way to recover your health and strength after the flu.

This Bonox advertisement promised a robust recovery.
Trove Digitised Newspapers, Herald (Melbourne), April 26, 1919, p9, National Library of Australia

News of ‘cures’ spread far and wide

In much of Australia just after WWI there were often no doctors close by. So many people were used to dosing themselves with homemade potions and remedies. They shared their prescriptions in the pages of local newspapers.

Between 1918 and 1920, Australian newspapers were flooded with Spanish flu cures of all kinds.

In October 1918, a journalist at Victoria’s Bendigo Independent lamented:

Cures? My goodness me, the vast amount of cures on the market are positively frightening, and everyone has a favorite cure. I pin my faith to one, you to another. There’s a certain influenza mixture that, taken in the early stages, is regarded as a certain cure by one large section […] Asperin [sic] is the cry of another batch of victims, and they tell you that that drug does the trick. ‘Try whiskey and milk taken hot and taken often,’ is the advice of others who have had it. But one and all end in the same way: ‘Go to bed and stay there till the thing leaves you.’

Aspro advertising, Telegraph (Qld), 30 July 1921, page 14.
Trove Digitised Newspapers, National Library of Australia

Aspirin was very popular as a Spanish flu treatment worldwide. But people sometimes took it at dangerously high doses, which may have boosted the number of deaths attributed to the flu.

In the absence of many other treatments, government authorities promoted aspirin, along with quinine and phenacetin.

The pain killer phenacetin is now banned because it’s linked to kidney and urinary tract cancers.

Like aspirin, its overuse might have boosted the Spanish flu death rate.

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They’re using it in America

Like today, Australians were also eagerly reading about overseas experiments, and wanting to try these cures locally.

In June 1919, the Richmond River Herald reported:

On Friday we published the following New York cable: — ‘Dr. Charles Duncan, at the Convention of the American Medical Association, said the cure for influenza was one drachm of infected mucus pasteurised and with filtered water injected subcutaneously … Yesterday (says Tuesday’s Tweed ‘Daily’) a youth was seen inquiring for a chemist, having in his hand the above clipping and sixpence, his object being to secure that amount’s worth of the ‘cure.’ Several others, it is understood, have also been inquiring into the same matter, with a view to ‘having it made up’ locally.

Some of these cures lingered

Once the Spanish flu pandemic was over, many of the cures remained. Most of them, like aspirin, incorporated the threat of influenza into regular advertising.

Some, like quinine, have made a reappearance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And one of the most commonly recommended cures — whisky taken at frequent intervals — hasn’t lost its popularity.

Philippa Martyr, Lecturer, Pharmacology, Women’s Health, School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Eradicating smallpox: the global vaccination push that brought the world ‘arm-to-arm’

Edward Jenner vaccinating his son, held by Mrs Jenner; a maid rolls up her sleeve, a man stands outside holding a cow. Coloured engraving by C. Manigaud after E Hamman. The Wellcome Collection.

Michael Bennett, University of TasmaniaAs the roll-out of COVID vaccines proceeds, it’s worth looking back on the challenges and successes of the early global spread of smallpox vaccination.

Smallpox (also known by its scientific name, variola) was a horrible, highly infectious disease, with a case fatality-rate of 30%. In 1798, Edward Jenner, an English country doctor, published data on cowpox (or “vaccine”, a term derived from the Latin for cow and increasingly preferred by Jenner; modern scientific name vaccinia). His data suggested this pustular disease found on dairy cows protected people from smallpox.

He detailed experiments in which he inoculated children with cowpox (usually by nicking the arm and inserting cowpox pus under the skin), and presented the inoculation of cowpox as a safe and effective way to prevent smallpox.

Jenner’s claims were initially met with scepticism. Even in Britain, vaccination was not taken up on any scale until 1800. By this time, though, cowpox samples were being dispatched overseas and attracting great interest as a way to protect people against smallpox. By 1805, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, people were already being vaccinated all around the world. By 1815, several million people, half of them outside Europe, had been vaccinated.

Sadly, however, the global eradication of smallpox was not achieved until the late 1970s.

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The wonder of cowpox

Smallpox was universally feared but people had learned to live with it. It was easy enough to recognise; victims became visibly ill before they became infectious. Crucially, people knew that if they survived the attack, they could be confident of lifelong immunity.

Learning to live with smallpox sometimes involved deliberately exposing children to the disease in the hope of a mild outcome. In Britain, it was found smallpox inoculation — that is, making a light cut in the arm and applying smallpox pus to the wound — resulted in far fewer deaths than in cases of naturally acquired smallpox.

It was as a practitioner of smallpox inoculation (which was also known as variolation) that Jenner found evidence people who had been casually infected with cowpox appeared to be immune to smallpox infection.

He put the theory to the test by inoculating a boy with cowpox lymph — taken not from the cow but from a vesicle or blister on a milkmaid’s hand — and demonstrating his resistance to smallpox by variolation.

Jenner’s presentation of cowpox as a safe and effective substitute for smallpox found corroboration in trials in London in 1799. It wasn’t easy to allay doubts among parents. Still, people were even more scared of smallpox, and recognised smallpox inoculation involved significant risk to the patient and the community. Cowpox was a game-changer.

More diaspora than roll-out

Although hailed as a boon, the new approach got off to a shaky start. Cowpox was rare, appearing only sporadically in dairy farms. The supply of vaccine depended from the outset on its propagation on human bodies. If the vaccine “took” on the child’s arm then, nine or ten days later, the ripe pustule was pricked to provide fresh vaccine.

Children of the poor were immunised at no charge and, on returning to clinics for examination, were put arm-to-arm with the next batch of children. Some vaccine was dried, often on cotton threads, as a future supply. Quality control was a major problem. In 1800, a cowpox institute was set up in London to propagate and distribute vaccine and in 1803 the Royal Jenner Society was established to promote the practice.

Cowpox was a rare disease, appearing only sporadically in dairy farms.
J. Pass, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The spread of the first vaccine was more diaspora than roll-out. Samples of cowpox on cotton threads were sent in the post, in Britain and overseas, rather in the manner of plant seeds.

Many samples proved useless on arrival, but by sending them in some profusion, it proved relatively simple to seed the practice in Europe and North America. Improvements in packaging even made it possible to send vaccine from Vienna to Baghdad, where it was propagated for onward transmission to India in 1802. Viable vaccine was even delivered, after a 154-day voyage, to Sydney in 1804.

The world arm-to-arm

Another approach to conquering the tyranny of distance was to move patients under vaccination. Early in 1802, Tsar Alexander approved an expedition to establish vaccination through Russia in which children vaccinated in one province were escorted to go “arm-to-arm” with children in the next. In 1803, King Carlos of Spain launched an even grander expedition that, by vaccinating a succession of children, delivered live vaccine to Spanish America and then across the Pacific to Manila and Macao.

Vaccination literally brought the world arm-to-arm. The rapid global spread of the vaccine itself owed a lot to the universal dread of smallpox but also to humanitarian enthusiasm and international collaboration.

A range of measures were used to embed the practice. In Berlin, children were given trinkets and medals. Poor mothers in Mexico and India were bribed to have their children vaccinated. In Austria, mothers whose children died of smallpox were named and shamed.

Some states moved rapidly along the road to compulsion. In France, where Napoleon was a great advocate of the practice, vaccination was urged as a civic duty but not made mandatory. In Denmark, a vaccination certificate was rapidly made a requisite for schooling, public employment and even marriage.

Complacency and lack of resolve

Aware of vaccine’s global success, Jenner and his colleagues deplored the loss of momentum in Britain itself. In London, the practice was under challenge from a noisy anti-vaccination lobby led by old-style inoculators.

A smallpox epidemic in 1805, while showing the value of vaccination, disclosed some failures arising from poor early practice. In claiming vaccination was for life, Jenner had set the bar too high. To the end of his life in 1823, he was reluctant to concede the need for periodic re-vaccination.

The major problem in Britain and elsewhere was complacency. The early success in suppressing smallpox, and indeed eliminating it in some places, led parents to neglect vaccination.

Outbreaks in the 1830s were a major shock and pushed the British government to fund vaccination in 1840 and to make it mandatory in 1853. Victoria — though not New South Wales — followed this lead. Although it was controversial and fuelled anti-vaccination sentiment, compulsory vaccination, with some provision for conscientious objection, played a vital role making the practice routine. This kept smallpox at bay, prompted improvements, and helped inspire the development of new vaccines.

From the outset, vaccination was seen as a means of eradicating smallpox. It saved countless lives, kept communities safe for as long as vaccination was maintained, and limited the severity of outbreaks.

The permanent elimination of smallpox required governments to provide the infrastructure and resources, and show the political will to incentivise if not mandate vaccination.

Although the disease was largely brought under control in the West, millions were still dying from smallpox elsewhere in the middle of the twentieth century when the World Health Organization committed itself to the global eradication of smallpox.

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Michael Bennett, Professor in School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How the bubonic plague changed drinking habits

Engraving of a man drinking plague water during the 1665 London outbreak.
Wellcome Collection, CC BY-NC-SA

James Brown, University of SheffieldAlcohol deaths in England and Wales in 2020 were the highest for 20 years. The Office for National Statistics recorded 7,423 deaths from alcohol misuse, a 19.6% increase compared with 2019. Although this is likely to have many complex causes, data from Public Health England suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting lockdowns are at least partly responsible for the increase. Largely, the disruption of work and social routines have led to a surge of hazardous drinking within the home (with some fairly harrowing personal stories).

The Intoxicating Spaces project, of which I’m part, has been exploring how pandemics also influenced the use of intoxicants, including patterns of alcohol consumption, in the past. As part of this work, we’ve looked at how the successive bubonic plague outbreaks that gripped England, especially London, in the 17th century (1603, 1625, 1636 and 1665) wrought similar changes in people’s drinking habits.

Like today, these sudden and frightening outbreaks of disease restricted access to inns, taverns, alehouses and other public drinking places – the cornerstones of early-modern sociability. While never subject to wholesale closure, these environments were targeted by the equivalent of social distancing legislation. A 1665 London plague order, for example, identified “tippling in taverns, alehouses, coffee-houses, and cellars” as “the greatest occasion of dispersing the plague”, and imposed a 9pm curfew.

The extent to which these regulations altered 17th-century people’s relationship with alcohol is difficult to determine based on surviving information. However, anecdotal evidence suggests there might have been a comparable shift towards drinking at home.

In his classic 1722 meditation on the 1665 London outbreak Due Preparations for the Plague, Daniel Defoe told the story of a London grocer who voluntarily quarantined himself and his family in their home for the duration of the pandemic. Among the provisions he assembled were 12 hogsheads of beer; casks and rundlets containing four varieties of wine (canary, malmsey, sack and tent; 16 gallons of brandy; and “many sorts of distill’d waters” (spirits).

A painting of a quarantined house during the 1665 London plague outbreak, with the signboards of public houses visible in the background.
Wellcome Collection, CC BY-SA

According to Defoe, this impressive stockpile was not gratuitous but “necessary supplies”. This is because, surprisingly from the perspective of today’s public health messaging, in this period alcohol was thought to have had medicinal value and its moderate consumption during plague outbreaks was actively encouraged.

Doctor’s orders

Contemporary doctors and medical writers believed alcohol worked as a plague preventatives, in two main ways.

First, the consumption of beers, wines and spirits was believed to strengthen the body’s key defensive organs of the brain, heart and liver. They were especially beneficial when taken first thing in the morning, with many commentators recommending fortifying liquid plague breakfasts.

In his 1665 plague treatise, Medela Pestilentiae, minister and medical writer Richard Kephale claimed that it’s good “to drink a pint of maligo [Malaga wine or port] in the morning against the infection”. (He was also effusive on “the inexpressible virtues of tobacco”.) Many recipes for the popular “preventative” and “cure” plague water invariably contain wine and spirits, as well as pharmaceutical herbs.

Second, and perhaps more significantly, moderate drinking was believed to ward off those fearful mental states that induced melancholy (early modern terminology for depression), which was thought to make people more vulnerable to contracting the plague.

As Defoe put it, the grocer’s liquor hoard was not for his and his family’s “mirth or plentiful drinking”, but rather “so as not to suffer their spirits to sink or be dejected, as on such melancholy occasions they might be supposed to do”. Likewise, in his 1665 plague treatise, Zenexton Ante-Pestilentiale, physician William Simpson advocated the “drinking of good wholesome well-spirited liquor” to “make the heart merry” and “cause cheerfulness”. This would banish “many enormous ideas of fear, hatred, anxiousness, sorrow, and other perplexing thoughts”, and thereby “fortify the balsam of life against all infectious breaths”.

Engraving of the 1665 London outbreak.
Wellcome Collection., CC BY-NC-SA

The key thing for all of these writers was alcohol “moderately taken”. Excessive drinking to the point of drunkenness was still cautioned against, and “living with temperance upon a good generous diet” (in the words of one author) remained the baseline for most plague medicine.

However, then as now, it’s likely that the disruption of patterns of labour and leisure, along with the daily anxieties of living in a plague-stricken city, drove many to the psychological consolations of the bottle on a more dangerous and habitual basis. In A Journal of the Plague Year – Defoe’s other, more celebrated novel about the 1665 London outbreak – he tells the story of a physician who kept his “spirits always high and hot with cordials and wine”. But “could not leave them off when the infection was quite gone, and so became a sot for all his life after”.

James Brown, Research Associate & Project Manager (UK), University of Sheffield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Brief History of Antidepressants

COVID-19 vaccination: What we can learn from the great polio vaccine heist of 1959

In a pandemic, vaccines are in very high demand, and this threatens their supply.
(Shutterstock)

Paula Larsson, University of Oxford

We find ourselves at a precarious time in global health. Many people are anxiously awaiting their turn to receive a vaccine for COVID-19, yet roll-out is slow and disorganized, with many countries facing supply shortages.

The conditions are ripe for opportunists to exploit the situation. Reports of unethical line-jumping by wealthy elites have started to surface, while others warn of the potential for a black-market trade in vaccines.

This isn’t the first time people have waited anxiously for a vaccine. The looking-glass of history reveals the uneasiness of emotion that accompanies moments like these, as well as the dark consequences that can arise when evil-doers take advantage of them.

One case in particular stands out as an important lesson for today: when thousands of vaccine doses were stolen by armed men during a supply shortage in 1959.

The polio epidemic

It was the summer of 1959, when the last great epidemic of poliomyelitis swept across Canada. Québec saw the most cases that year, with the newspapers reporting over a thousand cases and 88 deaths.

Although the health authorities in Montréal warned the public about the seriousness of the summer epidemic, they also begged the populace to remain calm. This was far from comforting for parents who feared for their children.

Polio infection could cause permanent paralysis and was deadly in five per cent of cases. Montréalers rushed to the vaccine clinics, sometimes waiting for hours in the rain.

Vaccine production in Canada was limited to only two laboratories, with the majority being provided by Connaught Labs at the University of Toronto. This put intense pressure on vaccine supplies and Québec, like the rest of North America, soon faced a vaccine shortage.

Headline images showing the lone lines of people waiting to get a Salk vaccine. ‘The Montreal Gazette,’ Aug. 11, 1959.
The Montreal Gazette

A planned robbery

By August, Montréal was waiting desperately for more vaccines. It was a great relief when a huge shipment of the cherry-red vials arrived from Connaught Labs at the end of the month. The supply was enough to cover the city, and the surplus was planned for redistribution across the province.

Yet the redistribution never came to pass. One man by the name of Jean Paul Robinson, a temporary vaccine worker, had found the circumstances too enticing. Robinson had been tasked with running vials between the various clinics. He knew there was a shortage and that people were desperate. He also knew where the main supply of vaccine was stored: at the Microbiology Institute in the University of Montréal.

At 3 a.m. on Aug. 31, 1959, Robinson and two accomplices broke into the university armed with revolvers. They first locked the night guard in a cage with 500 lab monkeys. The thieves then broke the lock on the massive refrigerator, looted all the cases of the vaccine and stole the guard’s car as the getaway vehicle. In the end, they made away with 75,000 vials, valued at $50,000 (equivalent to almost $500,000 today). Robinson rented an empty apartment building and stashed his prize.

The crime shocked the country. The next day, the city announced it had completely run out of its vaccine supplies. Reporters seized on the situation, publishing reports of desperate mothers turned away from vaccine clinics in vain.

The provincial police were called in, and a special four-man team of investigators was assembled. They began by interviewing the hapless night guard. He couldn’t identify the culprits — who had been wearing nylon leggings over their faces — but he did overhear them speak about transporting the vaccines. The conversation provided the only lead: it seemed that at least one of the men had been “familiar with medical terms.”

The police soon brought in a medical student for questioning. By the next day, they had seized a supply of fresh vaccine from the shelves of a Pont-Viau drug store. The confiscated vials displayed the same serial number as the missing supply. Yet questioning both the medical student and the druggist led the police nowhere, and over the next few days, all leads ran dry. Worse yet, it seemed that the city was facing an upswing in infections, with another 36 patients admitted to hospital.

The widespread application of the polio vaccine in the 1950s and ‘60s helped bring polio under control in the early 1970s. Canada was certified ‘polio free’ in 1994. This image of polio patients was taken in September 1947 in Edmonton, Alta.
(Canadian Public Health Association)

Risk and capture

Meanwhile, Robinson was trying to figure out what to do with his ill-gotten supply of vaccine. Keeping the product cold was a difficult task — if left unrefrigerated for too long, the vaccine would be useless. He filled the refrigerator (saving one shelf for beer), while the rest of the cases were simply left on the floor at room temperature. Although he had been lucky to sell 299 vials for a tidy sum of $500 to the druggist at Pont-Viau, dispensing with the rest of the vaccine was too risky.

Taking a chance that the police were more interested in recovering the vials than catching the culprit, Robinson placed a call to the public police line. Posing as a concerned citizen, he declared that he had seen a large amount of suspicious cases labelled “Connaught Laboratories” being loaded out of a car on St. Hubert Street in the East End.

The police quickly discovered the missing cases of vaccine, but before they could be used, the vaccines would need to be tested thoroughly. This process could take up to two months, meaning the vials could not be used despite the epidemic. Fresh shipments of the vaccine were not planned to arrive for a few more weeks.

The public met the outcome of the investigation with outrage, with the Montréal Star going so far as to speculate that the police had made a deal with the guilty parties in order to recover the vaccine. Truly, it declared, “in the history of justice in Canada, this case must be unprecedented.” The stolen vaccines were eventually cleared for general use in October.

For their part, the police were far from done investigating. They soon turned their attention to identifying the culprit. They discovered that the man who had provided the police tip was also the man who had sold the Pont-Viau druggist his 299 vials. Evidence continued to mount against Robinson when the janitor of the apartment building identified him. After denying all charges, Robinson fled. He was discovered three weeks later hiding out in a small shed on an “isolated backroad farm.”

The vaccine heist of 1959 shocked the Canadian public and made headlines across the country. ‘Victoria Daily Times,’ Aug. 31, 1959.
(Victoria Daily Times)

‘Beyond reasonable doubt’

Prosecuting Robinson turned out to be a much harder task, and the case eventually fell apart. Although one of his accomplices had originally identified Jean Paul Robinson as the mastermind of the heist, when the trial came around two years later, the witness recanted his original statement (he would later be charged with perjury).

Robinson himself proved imperturbable during courtroom interrogations. He painted himself a public-spirited citizen who had simply tried to “retrieve” the stolen vaccines from the true criminal mastermind: a mysterious man by the name of Bob. Robinson claimed that Bob had set the whole thing up before he had disappeared and escaped justice. The judge eventually ruled that although Robinson’s story was “strange and a little far-fetched,” in the end, “the Crown had not proven a case beyond a reasonable doubt” and he was acquitted.

As millions of people worldwide anxiously await the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines, this case warns of the possible consequences of disorganized and poorly planned vaccine programs. Those looking to profit from mistakes, shortages and desperation are out there, and it is important that policy makers keep this in mind as vaccination programs are rolled out.

Paula Larsson, Doctoral Student, Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Worst Pandemics in History

The First Vaccine

Hippocrates and willow bark? What you know about the history of aspirin is probably wrong

Wellcome Images, CC BY-SA

Philippa Martyr, University of Western Australia

Aspirin is one of the most widely used drugs in the world. Its main ingredient comes from a natural product, salicin, found in plants such as willow and myrtle.

Aspirin is also a good example of how myths build up around ancient medicines.

Its origins have been closely linked with Hippocrates, the famous ancient Greek doctor and so-called father of medicine. He’s said to have used willow for pain relief, inspiring the development of aspirin centuries later.

But his writings barely mention willow. So why do we still believe the myth?

What’s all this about willow?

Practically every history of aspirin tells you Hippocrates prescribed willow to women in labour. Some say he prescribed willow leaf tea. Others say he told them to chew willow bark.

But when we look at what Hippocrates actually wrote, there is just one reference to burning willow leaves to make smoke for “fumigating” the uterus to get rid of a miscarried pregnancy.

This is pretty much the only reference to willow — ιτεα or itea — as a drug in these writings.

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Could willow actually relieve pain?

Willow bark and leaves were used in some ancient medicines. However, these were often used externally, rather than swallowed. Because ancient weights and measures are confusing — and sometimes missing altogether in recipes — it’s hard to tell whether there was enough salicin in an ancient recipe to make a difference.

The bark of white willow (Salix alba), which Hippocrates may have been talking about, doesn’t contain much salicin, compared with other willows and salicin-rich plants like the myrtle tree.

The bark of white willow doesn’t contain much salicin.
Raw Pixel/Public Domain

A clinically effective dose of 60–120mg of salicin would be very hard to obtain from simply chewing white willow bark or drinking willow tea.

White willow also contains toxic, bitter-tasting tannins. These would make it hard to consume enough bark or tea to reach that dose, and would cause stomach pain long before you got there.

Natural salicin is more abundant in other ancient plants, such as the myrtle tree. But even then you would still probably give yourself a terrible stomach ache after ingesting enough of the plant to relieve pain.

Dioscorides was an ancient Roman who wrote a guidebook of medicines, still in print today. He described willow as a remedy for stomach ache, the respiratory disease tuberculosis, and as a contraceptive.

He said if you burned willow bark, soaked it in vinegar, then rubbed it on corns and calluses, it would remove them. He also recommended a hot pack containing willow leaves for gout (which we know now as a type of arthritis).

Celsus, another Roman medical writer, said warm willow packs or poultices would treat a prolapse of the womb or bowel (where the organ literally falls out of the body). Celsus advised to push it back in, and then bandage the warm dressing on the outside.

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Salicin is used today to treat corns and warts. But this doesn’t mean Dioscorides’ recipe worked because of the salicin. Vinegar is acidic and is said to soften corns on its own. Applying any kind of warm pack will also relieve pain.

If willow bark and leaves were handy and potent painkillers, we would have used them almost to extinction by now. Instead, by early modern times in Europe, willow was considered largely useless as a medicine.

This doesn’t mean willow was actually useless. It still contained salicin, but this hadn’t yet been isolated or refined into its modern form.

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So, if it wasn’t Hippocrates, who was it?

It was English cleric Reverend Edward Stone who “rediscovered” willow.

In around 1757, Stone chewed on white willow bark out of curiosity and was struck by how bitter it was. He wondered whether it could be used medicinally, like the bitter cinchona bark (where the malaria drug quinine comes from).

Stone gathered and dried around half a kilogram of willow bark, then ground it to powder, before taking small doses every four hours to reduce his fever. Drying the bark would have concentrated the salicin, making its effect stronger.

When the powder seemed to relieve his fever, Stone tried it on his parishioners when they were sick. In 1763, he wrote to the Royal Society, reporting it worked.

How did a plant extract turn into aspirin?

Italian researchers Brugnatelli and Fontana managed to extract salicin from willow bark in 1826. Then German pharmacologist Johann Andreas Buchner created the name “salicin” in 1828 from the Latin word for willow, salix.

Felix Hoffmann, a researcher at the German company now known as Bayer, chemically modified the related molecule salicylic acid, which was eventually named aspirin. The company patented the name in 1899.

Aspirin is one of the most widely used medicines today.
Daniel Foster/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Today aspirin is used for pain relief, reducing swelling, lowering body temperature and preventing blood clots.

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Weekly Dose: aspirin, the pain and fever reliever that prevents heart attacks, strokes and maybe cancer

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Why do we keep repeating the willow myth?

Researchers keep repeating the myth that ancient people understood the link between willow and salicin for pain relief, partly because everyone loves an epic tale. And the story of aspirin can be turned into one, with a bit of imagination. But it’s a good reminder to look at original texts if you can.

It’s also an example of how confirmation bias works. We know salicin is in willow, and salicin relieves pain. So when we find ancient references to willow, we think ancient people discovered salicin before us.

Modern medicine likes a respectable family tree. It helps give today’s manufactured products a good pedigree. It also helps us think of these products as safe, beneficial and part of a long healing tradition.

But the “ancient” history of aspirin has a lot of holes in it. So next time you pop an aspirin, thank Hoffmann rather than Hippocrates.

Philippa Martyr, Lecturer, Pharmacology, Women’s Health, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Surviving the Black Death

Scarabs, phalluses, evil eyes — how ancient amulets tried to ward off disease

An Egyptian winged scarab amulet (circa 1070 –945 BC).

Marguerite Johnson, University of Newcastle

Throughout antiquity, from the Mediterranean to Egypt and today’s Middle East, people believed that misfortune, including accidents, diseases, and sometimes even death, were caused by external forces.

Be they gods or other types of supernatural forces (such as a daimon), people — regardless of faith — sought magical means of protection against them.

While medicine and science were not absent in antiquity, they competed with entrenched systems of magic and the widespread recourse to it. People consulted professional magicians and also practised their own forms of folk magic.

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Spells, charms, erotic dolls: love magic in the ancient Mediterranean

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Possibly derived from the Latin word “amoliri”, meaning “to drive away” or “to avert”, amulets were believed to possess inherent magical qualities. These qualities could be naturally intrinsic (such as the properties of a particular stone) or imbued artificially with the assistance of a spell.

Not surprisingly the use of amulets was an integral part of life. From jewellery and embellishments on buildings, to papyri inscribed with spells, and even garden ornaments, they were deemed effective forms of protection.

Amulets have been around for thousands of years. Amber pendants from Denmark’s Mesolithic age (10,000-8,000 BC) seem to have been worn as a form of generic protection.

Jewellery and ornaments referencing the figure of the scarab beetle were also popular all-purpose amulets in Egypt, dating from the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (2000 BC).

A solar scarab pendant from the tomb of Tutankhamen.
Wikimedia Commons

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Two of the most common symbols of protection are the eye and the phallus. One or both amulet designs appear in many contexts, providing protection of the body (in the form of jewellery), a building (as plaques on exterior walls), a tomb (as an inscribed motif), and even a baby’s crib (as a mobile or crib ornament).

In Greece and the Middle East, for example, the evil eye has a history stretching back thousands of years. Today the image adorns the streets, buildings and even trees of villages.

A tree adorned with the evil eye symbol in a Turkish village.
Marguerite Johnson

The magic behind the evil eye is based on the belief that malevolence can be directed towards an individual through a nasty glare. Accordingly, a “fake” eye, or evil eye, absorbs the malicious intention in place of the target’s eye.

Wind chimes

Greek ‘herm’ (circa sixth century BC).

The phallus was a form of magical protection in ancient Greece and Rome. The Greek sculpture known as a “herm” in English functioned as apotropaic magic (used to fend off evil). Such artefacts, featuring a head and torso atop a pediment — often in the shape of a phallus and, if not, definitely featuring a phallus — were used as boundary markers to keep trespassers out.

The implicit threat is that of rape; come near a space that is not your own, and you may suffer the consequences. This threat was intended to be interpreted metaphorically; namely, a violation of another’s property would entail some form of punishment from the supernatural realm.

The phallus amulet was also popular in ancient Italian magic. In Pompeii, archaeologists have uncovered wind chimes called tintinnabulum (meaning “little bell”). These were hung in gardens and took the form of a phallus adorned with bells.

This phallic shape, often morphing into bawdy forms, presented the same warning as the herm statues in Greece. However, the comic shapes in combination with the tinkling of bells also revealed a belief in the protective power of sound. Laughing was believed to ward off evil forces, as was the sound of chimes.

Tintinnabulum from Pompeii (circa first century AD).
Author provided

One scholarly view of magic is that it functions as the last recourse for the desperate or dispossessed. In this sense, it presents as a hopeful action, interpreted by some modern commentators as a form of psychological release from stress or a sense of powerlessness.

Contemporary ‘magical thinking’

In the context of “magical thinking”, amulets may be dismissed by critical thinkers of all persuasions, but they remain in use throughout the world.

Often combined with science and common sense, but not always, amulets have made a resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic. The amulets are equally as diverse, coming in all shapes and sizes, and promoted by politicians, religious leaders and social influencers.

A traditional form of adornment and protection in Javanese culture, now popular with tourists, “burnt root” bracelets, known as “akar bahar”, have been sold by community shamans. Indonesia’s Agriculture Minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo, meanwhile, has promoted an aromatherapy necklace containing a eucalyptus potion touted as a preventative against COVID (useless in terms of science but perhaps less dangerous than hydroxychloroquine).

This necklace prompts the question: where does alternative medicine end and magic begin? It is not a new question, since there has been an intersection between magical lore and medical knowledge for thousands of years.

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In Babylon, circa 2000-1600 BC, a condition known as “kuràrum disease” (identified as a ringworm, symptoms of which include facial pustules), was responded to by both magicians and doctors. And in one text there is a “healer” who appears to perform the role of magician and doctor simultaneously.

Other ancient cultures also practised medical magic through amulets. In Greece, magicians prescribed amulets to heal the wandering womb, a condition whereby the womb was believed to dislodge and travel throughout a woman’s body, thus causing hysteria.

These amulets could take the form of jewellery on which a spell was inscribed. Amulets were also used to prevent pregnancy, as evidenced in a recipe written in Greek from around the second century BC, which instructed women to: “take a bean with a bug inside it and fasten it to yourself as an amulet.”

In a contemporary religious context, written amulets replace spells with prayers. In Thailand, for example, Phisutthi Rattanaphon, an Abbot at Wat Theraplai Temple in Suphan Buri, has issued people with orange paper inscribed with protective words and pictures.

Designed to ward off COVID-19, the papers represent the crossover between magic and religion; a paradigm as entrenched as the blurring of magic and medicine in numerous historical and cultural contexts. Thankfully, face masks and hand sanitiser are also available at the temple.

Marguerite Johnson, Professor of Classics, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.