Category: Consumer Medicine

• The Aspirin and War Connection

  The Aspirin and War Connection was the belief that aspirin, because of its deep association with the German company Bayer, was not merely a pain reliever but a subtle foreign instrument circulating through American bodies. In its strongest form, the theory claimed that aspirin weakened the heart, thinned national vigor, or prepared the civilian population for invasion by making people physically softer and more medically dependent. The theory drew power from real historical facts: aspirin was developed and branded by Bayer, Bayer was a German company, and anti-German suspicion remained intense in the United States through and after World War I. The conspiracy version transformed a mass medicine into a slow pharmacological weapon.