[1] In 1745, Stone became chaplain to Sir Jonathan Cope, 1st Baronet at Bruern Abbey and served various curacies around Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.
[1] Stone at one time lived on the site of the Hitchman Brewery in West Street, Chipping Norton, where a blue plaque has now been erected.
[1] Walking one day through a meadow near Chipping Norton, while suffering from "agues", Stone was prompted to detach and nibble at a small piece of bark from a willow tree and was struck by its extremely bitter taste.
Knowing that the bark of the Peruvian cinchona tree − from which quinine (used in the treatment of malarial fevers) is derived − has a similarly bitter taste, he surmised that the willow might also have therapeutic properties.
[6] According to Stone: "As this tree delights in a moist or wet soil, where agues chiefly abound, the general maxim that many natural maladies carry their cures along with them or that their remedies lie not far from their causes was so very apposite to this particular case that I could not help applying it [...].
"[7]He experimented by drying a pound of willow bark and creating a powder which he gave to about fifty persons: it was consistently found to be "a powerful astringent and very efficacious in curing agues and intermitting disorders".’ He had discovered salicylic acid, the principal metabolite of aspirin.
[12] It is certainly untrue that the inventors of aspirin were trying to find a substitute for willow bark; they were investigating the properties of a variety of acetylated organic compounds created in the laboratory, as a result of the discovery of acetanilide in the 1880s.