Before Aspirin

Long before there was a Felix Hoffmann, or an Arthur Eichengrün for him to report to, and long before there was a Bayer Company to sign their paychecks, there was pain. There was lots of pain. With lots of diseases being incurable, pain was everywhere. Even completely healthy people had lots of pain, since most of them spent twelve to sixteen hours each day doing back-breaking work.

Menu Endorphins Plants Animals Acupuncture

"The Headache."

But that's just what men had to endure. If you were a woman, you had to do sixteen hours of back-breaking work each day and give birth to six or seven babies. What's more, when you were too old to work or bear children, you could count on rheumatism or arthritis to keep you hurting until your time on Earth was done. The world was a painful place to live before the modern era.

So how did people long ago deal with all this ever-present pain? One approach was just to accept it because life was meant to be full of suffering, suffering that builds character. But many people then, as now, valued personal comfort over character-building, and looked for ways to treat their pain. To find out about the many ways people long ago sought relief from pain, follow the links on the menu at the top of the page.