Aspirin by Jeffreys Diarmuid

Author:Jeffreys, Diarmuid [Jeffreys, Diarmuid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2010-12-14T20:00:00+00:00

Although overdoses were rare, the article continued, they did occur and doctors should be aware of the possibility. However, it concluded: 'aspirin in ordinary doses appears to be singularly safe'.

It was a remarkable endorsement from one of the world's leading medical journals and must have been thoroughly enjoyed by the management at Leverkusen. Not that they needed any lessons from anyone about the drug's achievements. They had celebrated its success in their own way some two years before, when a huge illuminated 236-foot-diameter aspirin tablet, decorated with the Bayer Cross, was installed above the factory on the Rhine. When it was switched on, the lights could be seen for miles, a proud monument to the company's most famous product.

But things were changing at Leverkusen - and in Germany too. In 1938, the company published a lavishly printed booklet describing fifty years of Bayer pharmaceutical achievement. It proudly listed its many successes, aspirin among them, and concluded by describing how its modern technology was now 'always available to supply any doctor with Bayer preparations by the quickest route and in the shortest possible time'. The statement ran alongside a photograph of the company's new aeroplane, flying proudly down the Rhine over the giant Leverkusen complex. The wings of the aeroplane bore the famous Bayer Cross logo. Its tail fin was decorated with a large black swastika.

* With the exception of aspirin. Its sales doubled.

* Its only shortcoming was its necessary secrecy. Weiss knew that the American government wouldn't look too kindly on any commercial relationship with a company that only a few years before had been at the heart of the enemy's economic programme.

* Even now only Bayer Aspirin can be officially sold as aspirin in Canada. All other brands have to be called something else. It's just one of the complicated set of trademark rules and provisions that emerged in different countries around the world during and after the 1914—18 war, many of which still apply today. In Germany and seventy other countries Bayer still officially hold the aspirin trademark. In the United States, Britain and other places too numerous to mention, aspirin was ruled a generic term that anyone could use. It ceased to matter over time, of course, because wherever consumers buy the drug these days, they know aspirin by its generic name, regardless of which brand they actually purchase. However, Bayer still insists on putting a registered trademark sign alongside the name in all of its literature.

* Bearing in mind the many remarkable things that scientists now know that aspirin can do, this list doesn't look quite so far-fetched today, but at the time Davies was stretching the drug's properties to a quite extraordinary degree.

* Of course, whenever he tried this, some of the great men' involved would write and complain that their names and images had been taken in vain, but by then it was too late. Davies would promise (and even sometimes deliver) a small footnote apology on the next advertisement, but by then of course, he had also moved on to another unsuspecting endorsee.

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