Thursday, March 06, 2008
For Felix Hoffman and Hermann Dreser
As I feel a headache coming on, it seems only right to pay tribute to Felix Hoffman and Hermann Dreser, who - on this very day in 1899 - patented Aspirin, which seems to me to be the nearest thing we have to an everyday superdrug. Not only does it kill pain pretty effectively (especially in combination with codeine), cool fevers and thin the blood - there's also good evidence that it's preventative against a wide range of illnesses, including various forms of cancer. And yet - perhaps because it's so cheap and easily available - it's grievously undervalued, and many people (especially, in my experience, women) never go near it. They don't know what they're missing.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Quite right, Nige, that Patrick Swayze sounds as though he could do with an aspirin or two. Soluble, of course, a bleeding stomach is not amusing.
ReplyDeleteAh yes poor Patrick Swayze - I saw him once, sitting on Roy Marsden's lap. A touching scene... Talking of Apsirin, I was browsing in a charity shop just now and what should catch my eye but a book by Robert Asprin - of whom I had never heard until I saw Wiki's helpful disambiguation. It's a small world (but you wouldn't want to paint it)...
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