History of aspirin other studies from the 1960s to the 1980s established aspirin's efficacy as an anti-clotting agent that reduces the risk of clotting diseases. Aspirin sales revived considerably in the last decades of the twentieth century, and remain strong in the twenty-first with widespread use as a preventive treatment for heart attacks and strokes. Medicines derived from willow trees and other salicylate-rich plants have been part of pharmacopoeias at least dating back to ancient Sumer. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical text from ca. 1543 BCE, mentions use of willow and myrtle (another salicylate-rich plant) to treat fever and pain. Willow bark
History of aspirin century; Heinrich Dreser's explanation, widely accepted since the drug was first brought to market, was that aspirin relieved pain by acting on the central nervous system. In 1958 Harry Collier, a biochemist in the London laboratory of pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis, began investigating the relationship between kinins and the effects of aspirin. In tests on guinea pigs, Collier found that aspirin, if given beforehand, inhibited the bronchoconstriction effects of bradykinin. He found that cutting the guinea pigs' vagus nerve did not affect the action of bradykinin "or" the inhibitory effect of aspirin—evidence that aspirin worked locally to combat pain and inflammation,