Oh Hitler et al is old hat. 19th Century is so much more interesting.
Did you know that Heroin was first created in 1874 by C. R. Walden, a pharmacist working at St Mary’s Hospital in London, and that his aim was to determine the constitution of some natural and purified alkaloids? The Irony is that the discovery that would make such a powerful and dramatic impact on popular culture and modern society was to be a non-event. It went largely unnoticed until a chemist, H. Dresner, working for the German chemical company Fredrich Bayer & Co., produced an amount of diaceylmorphine in 1898.
And that…
...brief clinical tests showed this new drug to be a very powerful painkiller indeed. The boys upstairs [at Bayer] became very excited because Bayer began marketing the drug on a grand scale as a non-addictive [sic] treatment for respiratory ailments, suppression of coughs and treating morphine addiction [sic] (and interestingly, the year before, in 1897, Bayer introduced Aspirin into the market). The brand name given to this miraculous wonder drug, probably derived from the German word Heroisch, meaning heroic, was Heroin.
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