Taking a daily 81mg aspirin tablet has found favour for many males over age 50 as protection against cardiovascular disease. Now new evidence recently published in The Lancet suggests the same can prevent and possibly treat a range of cancers, including bowel, lung and prostate cancer.
The glucoside salacin, the active ingredient in aspirin, was first isolated in 1827 from bark of the white willow,
Salix alba, by a French chemist, one Henri Laroux. Unfortunately it proved a medical disaster with unpleasant side effects.
However, the astringent bark of various willows have for millennia been a traditional remedy for diarrhea, fever, arthritis and rheumatism, as notes
Richter's Herb Catalogue. The ancient Greeks, for example, utilized it to relieve pain and to treat gout. In North America, it found use amongst the First Nations against fevers, rheumatism and lumbago. In China, Wee & Hsuan have recorded brittle willow (
Salix fragilis) and basket willow (
Salix purpurea) as being the principle commercial sources of salacin.
Salacin also is found in the bark of close cousins of
Salix, the poplars,
Populus. Whether as one of the favourite foods of the beaver this prevents Canada’s toothy national animal from getting toothache is, it must be admitted, questionable.
As genera willows are a taxonomist’s nightmare. No one is absolutely sure just how many species there are. To confound matters they happily hybridize naturally with each other while there are perhaps as many as 200 artificial hybrids in cultivation. They mostly are to be found in cool and downright cold areas of the Northern Hemisphere.
Despite Dorothy Lamour’s song in the movie
Road to Singapore (1940),
Salix do not grow on low-lying tropical shores although she sits under just such a specimen. Lamour turns out to be much luckier than poor Desdemona, who also sang sadly about willows, only to be strangled by Othello. In another Shakespearean tragedy, Ophelia fell into the water and drowned beneath one.
Indeed willows, and in particular the weeping willow, have doleful associations. Many an 18th-century gravestone depicted such. Presumably this was a reflection of the 130th Psalm in which the enslaved Israelites wept under willows along the rivers of Babylon. Unfortunately for monument makers, botanists now tell us that translators of the Bible got it wrong and it was poplars, not willows that grew alongside Mesopotamian rivers.
Neither the Israelites nor various ladies made wise choices in their seating arrangements. Whatever their bark benefits, the trees are notorious for shedding large branches without warning. Except on properties of exceptional size, willow trees are poor landscape companions. They are also offer bed and board to innumerable pests and diseases.
Dried and properly seasoned, however, the light wood is tough and elastic, unlikely to splinter. This explains its use as the principle component of cricket bats. According to expert C. A. Stace of the University of Leicester, it has also been utilized for boxes, poles, steamer paddles, tool handles, and the brake blocks of railway stock.
Seven decades passed before Felix Hoffman in Germany created acetylsalicylic acid to relieve his father’s arthritis. The commercial name ‘aspirin’ was coined by Friederich Bayer & Co. to sell the manufactured product in the opening years of the 20th-century.
But alas for poor Salix: the name derived from another botanical source, ‘a’ for acetyl,
‘spirin’ for Spirea. Taxonomists, who often seem never to leave a good thing alone, have now determined that the Spirea concerned is correctly
Filipendula. In fact the European wildflower meadowsweet, Filipendula ulmaria, contains salicyclic acid. It is, as
Richter’s Herb Catalogue reminds us, useful for gout, rheumatism, arthritis, fever, etc., adding intriguingly that it was once added to herbal beers and wine.
Popping an aspirin may be an easier and more assured way to good health, however. Even better may be a ‘supercharged’ aspirin presently under development by Khosrow Kashfi and his team at The City College of New York. The human gut lining protects itself from damage by producing nitric oxide and hydrogen sulphide, notes a recent
New Scientist magazine item. So Kashfi, who obviously has a sense of humour, has developed the NOSH-aspirin, which produces both gases as it breaks down. Considerably more potent than plain aspirin alone, it proved effective against 11 different cancers when tested
in vitro.
The young wizard Harry Potter’s late mother, Lily, wielded a willow wand, Melody Joy Kramer observed in a recent National Geographic number. Actually, folks once drank willow leaf tea for pain relief, Kramer says. In the 1800s, a forerunner of aspirin consisted of an extract from the leaves. But the modern pill is all synthetic, she explained.
