Meadowsweet

During the Middle Ages, meadowsweet's delicate almond fragrance made it a popular air freshener, or "strewing herb."  It was scattered around homes at a time when people rarely bathed and when farm animals often shared human living quarters.  Later, this herb's sweet aroma and lovely blossoms earned it a place in bridal bouquets, hence the name bridlewort.  Later herbalists recommended meadowsweet to treat fevers, arthritis, "falling sickness" (epilepsy) and respiratory ailments.

Colonists introduced the plant into North America, and the 19th-century Eclectics considered it "an excellent astringent..in diarrhea.  It is less offensive to the stomach than other agents of its kind." They also prescribed it for menstrual cramps and vaginal discharges.

In 1839, a German chemist discovered meadowsweet flower buds contained salicin, the same chemical isolated from white willow bark 11 years earlier.  Salicin has powerful pain-relieving (analgesic), fever-reducing, and anti-inflammatory properties.  Unfortunately salicin (and its close chemical relatives, notably salicylic acid) also causes potentially hazardous side effects: stomach upset, nausea, diarrhea, stomach bleeding, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), and at high doses even respiratory paralysis and death.

Chemists began tinkering with salicylic acid hoping to preserve its benefits while minimizing its hazards.  In 1853, German chemists working with an extract of meadowsweet synthesized acetylsalicylic acid.  The new drug still had salicylic acid's side effects but was much more potent.  To name the new drug, they took the a from acetyl - the chemical they added to the extract - and spirin from meadowsweet's Latin nam, Spiraea, and came up with aspirin.  News of aspirin's development ws published in an obscure German medical journal and forgotten for almost 50 years.

Then in the late 1890's, a German chemist, Felix Hoffman, became upset that his father's rheumatoid arthritis medication brought him so little relief.  Hoffman worked at the Fredrich Bayer pharmaceutical company, and he began combining the journals for leads to a better arthritis treatment.  He came upon the old reports of aspirin and prepared the drug.  His father improved significantly after taking it.  At first, Bayer officials were not interested in Hoffman's arthritis remedy, but eventually they saw its potential, and in 1899 they introduced acetylsalicylic acid in Europe and North America under the brand name Aspirin.

Aspirin quickly became the household drug of choice for a broad range of everyday medical needs.  But in one of the earliest U.S. trademark-protection battles, Bayer lost its trademark to aspirin.  The court rules the word had passed into general usage.

Contemporary herbalists recommend meadowsweet for colds and flu, nausea, heartburn and other digestive upsets, muscle aches, dropsy (congestive heart failure) and childhood diarrhea.