ABSTRACT
Medicine has been a part of civilization since ancient times. 3,500-year-old texts from Ancient Egypt describe remedies to cure a variety of ailments (Dollinger, 2007). For example, the ancient Egyptian Ebers Papyrus describes giving an infusion of willow bark as a pain reliever. In the mid-1800s, chemists isolated an ingredient in willow bark and called it salicylic acid, which the Germans later refined into a pill they named Aspirin (Bellis, 2008a). The German company, Bayer, patented Aspirin in 1900-the same medicine that can still be purchased worldwide today. After the development of vaccines for childhood diseases in the 1950s and 1960s, the development of new drugs accelerated exponentially, resulting in a modern and vast pharmacopoeia today.
