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Tags: Ayers, diacetylmorphine, Diamorphine, heroin, medicine, morphine, paediatrics, pediatrics, pharmaceuticals by mike
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Diamorphine, also known as heroin, was first synthesized for commercial use in 1897. The men who discovered it, Felix Hoffman and Arthur Eichengrun, had also, a couple of weeks earlier, invented aspirin; for some years, heroin could be bought over the counter and aspirin required a prescription.

Irony is intense here, and the article is “technically” correct in that heroin was first synthesised in 1897 for commercial use. However, G.H. Beckett and C.R. Alder Wright were the first people known to have actually synthesised heroin, a generation earlier in 1874.

Tags: acetylsalicylic acid, Arthur Eichengrun, Aspirin, Bayer, C.R. Alder Wright, diacetylmorphine, Diamorphine, Felix Hoffman, G.H. Beckett, heroin by mike
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