09/02/2026
Willow in Medicine:
People have known about the medicinal uses of willow leaves and bark for a very long time. Ancient texts from places like Assyria, Sumer, and Egypt mention them. The Greek doctor Hippocrates wrote about willow's healing properties in the 400s BC.
It's hard to know exactly how ancient people used willow, but some old writings suggest it was used for different health issues. For example, the ancient Egyptian Ebers Papyrus mentions willow in remedies for making muscles flexible or for general weakness.
In 1763, an English clergyman named Edward Stone noticed that willow bark tasted bitter, like another plant (cinchona) used to treat fevers. He tried willow bark on people with fevers and thought it worked well. However, doctors at the time didn't widely adopt his remedy.
Later, in 1876, a Scottish doctor named Thomas John MacLagan found that a substance from willow, called salicin, helped treat a condition called acute rheumatism. Around the same time, German scientists were working with a similar chemical.
The famous painkiller Aspirin was created in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann at Bayer. He made acetylsalicylic acid, which was found to relieve pain. While aspirin is related to the chemicals found in willow, it was a new chemical created in a lab, not directly from the willow tree itself.
In modern times, some people still use willow bark for herbal remedies. Some believe it helps with headaches and other pains, linking it to the development of aspirin. However, current research suggests that willow extract might only have a very mild pain-relieving effect, and this might be due to other plant compounds, not just salicylic acid.
