Thomas MacLagan’s 1876 demonstration of the dramatic effects of salicin in rheumatic fever

It has been suggested without convincing documentation that people drank a potion of willow bark and chewed willow leaves to ease joint pains in the days of Hippocrates. What has been documented is that, in 1763, the Reverend Edmund Stone, a vicar in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, reported that a preparation he had made from dried willow bark was helpful in reducing fevers. Efforts to obtain a reliable extract of willow did not begin until the following century. In 1826, the Italians Brugnatelli and Fontana tried to produce a pure extract, and two years later Joseph Buchner, Professor of Pharmacy at Munich University, succeeded in producing bitter-tasting yellow crystals that he named ‘salicin’, after salix, the Latin name for willow. The formula of salicin is C13H18O7, and, in 1820, a French chemist, Henri Leroux, refined Buchner’s procedure and produced about 25 g of salicin.