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The aspirin in your medicine cabinet got its start in a tree like this one. People chewed willow bark for pain and fever for more than 3,500 years before anyone worked out why it helped.
The bark is loaded with a natural painkiller. An Egyptian medical scroll from around 1500 BC lists willow as a remedy for aches. The ancient Greeks reached for it too.
The path to the modern pill runs through England. In 1763, a man named Edward Stone wrote to the Royal Society, Britain's leading science academy, describing five years of treating feverish villagers with dried willow bark. Chemists later pulled the active ingredient out of the bark and named it salicin, after salix, the Latin word for willow. Your body breaks salicin down into a stronger painkiller, but that one is harsh on the stomach. So in 1897 a chemist at the German company Bayer tweaked the molecule into a gentler, steadier version. It went on sale in 1899 as aspirin.
It caught on. The world now makes around 40,000 tons of aspirin a year, more than 100 billion tablets, enough for about a dozen for every person on Earth. People take it for headaches, fevers, sore muscles, and to lower the odds of a heart attack, and they have swallowed something like a trillion tablets in the last hundred years.
But the willow never made any of this for us. That painkiller is the tree's own alarm system. When bugs or disease attack a willow, it pumps the chemical through its tissues to switch on its defenses and warn the rest of the tree that trouble is on the way. We took a tree's panic signal and pressed it into a pill.
The name is wrong, by the way. A Swedish scientist, Carl Linnaeus, called it Salix babylonica, willow of Babylon, because he figured it came from the ancient Middle East. It comes from northern China and traveled west along old trade routes. Most of the weeping willows you see in parks aren't the original tree at all. They're hybrids. They grow fast, live only about 40 to 75 years, and send out shallow roots that hunt for water. That is why you so often see them leaning over a pond, and why they are famous for wrecking the pipes underneath.
So sure, they might be the most beautiful trees in existence. They are also the reason the world's most common medicine exists.