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Critics of civilization like to target the pharmaceutical industry with their tirades - and the punch line is usually that every pill has done more harm than good.

But anyone who has ever had to perform with a bad cold or simply wanted to scare away a killer hangover will not join in this grumbling too loudly.

For the vast majority of people, painkillers are a blessing that allows you to experience the progress of medicine in everyday life.

Probably the most famous tablet in the world is called aspirin.

To this day, many people swear by the preparation, which is based on the active ingredient acetylsalicylic acid.

Bayer AG registered the brand name on March 6, 1899, and has since benefited from the work of two German chemists who developed the active ingredient.

Whether it was Arthur Eichengrün (1867–1949) who made the breakthrough or Felix Hoffmann (1868–1946) cannot be said with absolute certainty.

What is certain is that both must have been outstanding representatives of their subject.

As far as their areas of work, besides pain relievers, are concerned, cynics also get their money's worth.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Eichengrün worked a lot with the further development of cocaine - a substance that, as is well known, works so well shortly after it was taken that it falls under the Narcotics Act in Germany.

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Hoffmann even created an ultimate classic of the drug kitchen, known in specialist circles as diacetylmorphine, but popularly known as heroin;

another brand name that Bayer registered before the side effects cost drug approval.

With the invention of aspirin, the dispute revolves around whether Hoffmann carried out the decisive series of experiments himself or only provided the equipment for the experimental setup.

The packaging design reflected the zeitgeist

Source: picture-alliance / obs

However, since Eichengrün was Jewish and anti-Semitism of all stripes flourished in the empire towards the end of the 19th century, it is likely that his commitment did not at least receive his full appreciation.

Still, his success was unstoppable.

In 1908 he left Bayer and started his own business in Berlin.

His company developed, among other things, a patented plastic.

Eichengrün's biography was to take several absurd turns in the second half of his life.

The Nazis "Aryanized" his company in 1938, he himself remained free and continued his research at home.

After the forced sale of the company, he lived with his wife in Munich.

In 1943 the 76-year-old was sentenced to four months in prison: he had failed to add the word "Israel" to his name in a letter to a Reich official, as was prescribed for Jews.

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In May 1944 he was convicted again on the same charge.

This time he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he had to endure 14 months until the end of the war.

He died in 1949 in Bad Wiessee, Bavaria.

Today's viewers are left with astonishment at how much pain the Germans inflicted on a compatriot who, with his work, ensured that there was less pain in the world.

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