George Orwell and the Aspirin
George Orwell makes five references to Aspirin and Aspirin-eaters in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), almost all, if not all of them, negative and derogatory. It is a subject to which he returns in his other works. Is that justified?
George Orwell’s essay Inside the Whale, published on 11 March 1940, is based around a review of the American Henry Miller’s semi auto-biographical 1935 novel Tropic of Cancer. In this essay Orwell looked at British literary history during the generation from before the First World War to the late 1930’s. He compares Miller’s acceptance of life as it is to the works of the nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman; but points out that they lived in very different eras. To quote Inside the Whale:
To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.
Some of these things such as spies and political murders have existed since pre-historic times. The British Empire used concentration camps during the Boer war and the term was invented by the Spanish during the Cuban War of Independence.
Tinned food has overall improved nutritional standards, though Orwell may have been influenced by Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle set in the Chicago stockyards. Hollywood films gave enjoyment to the masses as did the private lives of its stars. Orwell’s negative listing of these is probably a reflection that he was infected with the intellectual snobbery of the intelligentsia to which he belonged.
Since the Second World War airliners have made it much easier to travel abroad. Until they were developed if a relative emigrated from, say, Britain to New Zealand one normally expected never to see them again. However one cannot blame a Spanish Civil War veteran for hating aeroplanes. Within a few months of publication of Inside the Whale most Britons did too. My late father remembered the old Coventry Cathedral a beautiful building. Its centuries of history were lost in a single night.
Bedaux Belts was a reference to Charles Eugene Bedaux (1886-1944) a French-American industrial management consultant and his theories. They were a cover for speeding up factory production lines and provoked many strikes and lock outs, even in countries such as Mussolini’s Italy and Vichy France where striking was a very dangerous activity.
Other derogatory references to the aspirin. The reference to aspirin in Inside the Whale is not Orwell’s only hostile reference to it. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) he quotes two passages from John Leonard Beever’s 1935 book World Without Faith; and sneers that Beever’s alleged
machine worship…… is the authentic voice of a large section of the modern world. Every aspirin eater in the outer suburbs would echo it fervently.
In his article Politics and the English Language (Horizon, April 1946) Orwell writes that:
Phrases like ‘a not unjustifiable assumption’, ‘leaves much to be desired’, ‘would serve no good purpose’, ‘ a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind’, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow.
I have found only one positive Orwell reference to the aspirin. In his 1946 article in the Evening Standard, he says that his favourite (actually invented) London pub The Moon Under Water sells aspirins. I once asked a publican about this. He told me that he had an agreement with the local chemist. The chemist did not sell beer and the publican did not sell medicines. Admittedly, Orwell points out the rarity of The Moon Under Water, as it also sells ‘stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone’.
The Aspirin. Aspirins were made from the constituents of willow bark and leaves (the latin name for the willow tree, salix, reappears in the chemical name for Aspirin, acetylsalicylic acid). Willow products have been used medically since prehistoric times and are first recorded in writing in ancient Sumerian and Egyptian times.
In 1853 the Strasbourg born French chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt (1816-1856) developed acetylsalicylic acid i.e. aspirin. The German pharmaceutical company Bayer, founded by Friedrich Bayer (1825-1889) developed it into a practical medicine and patented it in 1899. Its main initial use was as a pain killer and an anti-inflammatory drug. .Like most Britons I am using the word Aspirin generically: in some parts of the world it is a brand name.
Many years ago I campaigned for a very good Labour council candidate. The council seat was regarded as safe but the parliamentary constituency was not; and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were building up votes. I delivered so many leaflets and climbed so many low rise flat stairs that my knee joint became inflamed. My GP prescribed eight aspirin a day for three days. She told me that it was to cure the inflammation not just a painkiller. It worked.
Aspirin can also be used for chronic inflammatory conditions including rheumatoid arthritis and Kawasaki’s disease. Its main negative long term side effect is stomach trouble. Sheathed aspirin reduces this problem but does not completely solve it. Acute or chronic aspirin abuse is dangerous and it can be used as a mental crutch. This was so in Orwell’s day and is still so; but this problem has long been eclipsed by those caused by heroin (another drug developed by Bayer), cocaine, cannabis, hallucinogens, etc.
Aspirin use as an all-purpose painkiller reduced after the introduction of paracetamol (often called acetaminophen in the USA) in 1956 and ibuprofen (discovered in 1961, and first marketed in the UK in 1969 by the Boots company).. Its use has revived in recent years because it has been discovered that it can be used to reduce the chance of blood clotting and the consequent risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Conclusion. Most of Orwell’s list of negative things of his day are generally agreed to be bad things but not all. He had a streak of intellectual snobbery and sometimes it showed.
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