read this and then my question: nouveau art movement of the last century…inspired by this new cough med?
Victorian Altered Art Collage Humorous Art Print of Woman Shooting Heroin
A hundred years ago Heinrich Dreser made a fortune from the discovery of heroin and aspirin – but he may have ended his days as an addict. RICHARD ASKWITH reports on a chemist who prescribed heroin for coughs
| THE MAN in the 100-year-old photograph is not, to the modern eye, prepossessing. Balding, bespectacled and clerkish, he scarcely dominates his own portrait, let alone the picture of him with his staff in his laboratory.Yet Heinrich Dreser, chemist and opportunist, was one of the most influential men of his age.
Between 1897 and 1914, Dreser worked for Bayer, the former dye factory that was to become the first of the world’s pharmaceutical giants, in Wuppertal, north-west Germany. Friedrich Engels was born there. While Dreser made less of a mark on history, you could argue he had the greater influence on the 20th century. As head of Bayer’s pharmacological laboratory, he was responsible for the launch of two drugs that have shaped the way we live: aspirin, the world’s most successful legal drug; and heroin, the most successful illegal one. Aspirin, of which the world now consumes 40 billion tablets a year, was launched 100 years ago next February. A fanfare of publicity will mark the centenary.
 Heroin as a cough medicine
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I fucking LOVE this.