What’s the earliest recorded instance of a prescription and/or over-the-counter drug being given one of the euphonious but nonsensical names we’re familiar with today (Prozac, Allegra, Cafergot, etc.) instead of either a descriptive or herb-lore name? At what point did this naming convention take over completely?
I know this pseudoscientific naming is too deeply ingrained in the corporate culture of the prescription drug industry to change anytime soon, but with all the reports of pharmacists’ mixing up similarly named medications, wouldn’t it be cool to see a trend away from “Viagra” and back toward “Pfizer’s Dumbfounding Potency Restorative”?
This certainly isn’t limited to the drug industry. Look at all the dotcom companies with nonsensical names. They do it because they want a “brandable” name with unambiguous trademark status.
Sorry, can’t answer the actual question of earliest occurrence, but I think it’s something we’re stuck with now that it’s so necessary for a company to build a brand image for whatever widget they’re pushing.
The Balsam of Life was granted a Royal patent in 1744. (cite) This is thought to be the first (cite)“patent” medicine.
But certainly something like Healing Waters of the Ganges River or something came long before this and would possibly count as a psuedoscientific name. Someone musta turned up with with healing potions shortly after the invention of money.
“Balsam of Life” and “Water of the Ganges” fall into my “descriptive names” category. Today, in the pseudoscientific age, they’d be something like “Basovid” and “Flogan.” What I’m wondering is, when did “Balsam of Life” fade out and “Basovid” take over, and what caused it? Was it just yer run-of-the-mill science worship mixed with obsessive marketing, or was there something else to it?
Barbituric acid is so-called because it was first synthesised on St. Barbara’s Day, sometime in the middle of the 19th century. When phenobarbital was first developed, it was marketed by Bayer as Luminal. That was around the beginning of the first world war, if I recall correctly.
I would imagine, though am too lazy to look it up right now, that the creation of the Food & Drug Administration during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration had something to do with the changeover. The timing’s about right, anyway, & before the FDA, drugs weren’t really regulated to ensure that they did what they said they did. Once they were, names that described what the drug did wouldn’t be as important. Like, if you know that ibuprofen makes your headache goes away, you can buy a product called “ibuprofen”. If you didn’t know that, you would need to buy “Doctor Fantasia’s Pain-Relieving Elixir” or whatever, because “ibuprofen” wouldn’t have any meaning to you.
That’s pretty good. Do you do this for a living? I wonder, with all the “name generators” out there, if one for this kind of thing won’t be popping up soon.
Aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid, was synthesised by the Frenchman Charles Frederick von Gerhardt at the University of Montpelier in 1853, but he was not particularly interested in its practical use.
In 1893 Felix Hoffman, a young German chemist working at Bayer in Dusseldorf, rediscovered aspirin to treat his rheumatic father. Bayer began to market the drug in 1899 under the name Aspirin, formed from acetyl+spiraeic+in which was a popular ending for the names of medicines at the time.
It became available in the UK in October 1905. In the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 Germany surrendered the brand name to the Allies as part of her war reparations.
Recent studies have shown what had been suspected for a long time: that taken in moderation, aspirin is good for the heart.
The worldwide consumption of aspirin is in excess of 100 billion tablets per year. Its main rival, Paracetamol, first appeared in 1878.