Stone

On the twenty-fifth of April 1763, in the rectory at Chipping Norton in north Oxfordshire, the Reverend Edward Stone, sixty-one years old, the vicar of Chipping Norton since 1745, completed a five-page letter to the Royal Society of London titled An Account of the Success of the Bark of the Willow in the Cure of Agues. The letter reported Stone's six-year clinical-empirical study of about fifty Chipping-Norton-and-surrounding-parishes patients suffering from the ague (the eighteenth-century term for malaria, then endemic in the fenland country and the Oxfordshire valley parishes) to whom Stone had administered dried-and-powdered bark of the white willow (Salix alba) in twenty-grain doses three times a day. About forty of the fifty patients reported significant fever-reduction and recovery within five-to-fourteen-days; ten reported no effect. Stone had been led to the willow-bark trial by the late-mediaeval doctrine of signatures (the folk-pharmaceutical convention that plants growing in marshy fever-country must, by Providence, contain the cure for the fevers of that country). The Royal Society published Stone's letter in the Philosophical Transactions of 1763. The active ingredient (salicylic acid in the bark, later salicin in the 1828 Munich-laboratory isolation by Johann Andreas Buchner) was the foundational substance of the 1897 Bayer-laboratory synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid, marketed as Aspirin from 1899. Aspirin is, by every careful judgment of the twentieth-century pharmaceutical historians, the most-consumed manufactured drug in human history.

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