Heinrich Dreser, a chemist working for Bayer Pharmaceuticals, introduced the consumer world to diacetylmorphine in 1897. More commonly known as heroin, it was touted as a wonder drug promising to solve all of life's maladies ranging from tuberculosis to a disagreeable stomach. Like other opiates, heroin is a highly addictive and powerful pain killer. The word itself comes from the German "hero" and "heroic". Originally heroin was labeled safer drug than morphine and experts suggested that it could be used to help with morphine addiction. Less than five years after Bayer began mass production and physicians began to regularly prescribe it, heroin's addictive nature became well known and documented. By the 1920s the United States, France and the United Kingdom introduced legislation to curtail its recreational use and excessive prescription.

While modern pharmaceutical consumers prefer to focus on products which promise to bring life back to the bedroom and cloud reality in a blissful haze of apathy, late nineteenth and early twentieth century consumers focused on their stomachs, bladders and excrement. Dimethyl-piperazidine tartrate, trade name Lycetol, was prescribed to flush mineral deposits from the kidneys and bladder. Salophen also was encouraged for the maintenance of genitourinary tract health and promised to relieve the symptoms associated with the ubiquitous nineteenth century catch-all ailment, rheumatism.

When Dreser was presented with the compound for heroin, he also received that for acetylsalicylic acid; which he deemed relatively worthless. Dreser was wrong. His assistant, from whom Dreser regularly stole ideas, continued research on the aspirin compound. Ultimately, aspirin proved to be a effective and safe drug. At the end of WWI the economic reparations that Treaty of Versailles levied on the defeated Germans included the release of the formula for aspirin, so as to break Bayer's monopoly. Supposedly, aspirin is good for just about everything, heart, mind, soul and broken fingers.

Click on heroin for the artistic, aspirin to travel to other worlds, lycetol for the historic and salophen for the eccentric.