From the Internet:
Acetylsalicylic acid was first prepared by the German chemist Felix Hoffmann, an employee of Friedrich Bayer & Co., in 1897. It is now the active ingredient in more than 50 over-the-counter preparations; estimates put American consumption at 80 billion tablets annually.


Hippocrates , a Greek for whom the Hippocratic Oath is named, wrote about a bitter powder extracted from willow bark that could ease aches and pains and reduce fevers as long ago as the fifth century B.C. It is also mentioned in texts from ancient Sumeria , Egypt and Assyria . Native American Indians used it for headaches, fever, sore muscles, rheumatism, and chills. The Reverend Edmund Stone , a vicar from Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire England , noted in 1763 that the bark of the english willow was effective in reducing a fever, but his reasoning for that was very much in error.

And the myth of the phoenix seems to be based on idea of
purification by fire.

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