Barbiturate. Now where would you think of a name like that? Legend has it that this drug was derived when a 29 year old research assistant, Adolph von Baeyer, was working in his Belgian laboratory in 1863 when he took the condensation of malonic acid and combined it with Urea. Von Baeyer went downtown to a local pub to celebrate where some army officers where celebrating Feast Day of Saint Barbara. So he took the name Barbara and combined it with the chemical that mostly made up this new acid and came out with barbituric acid. In 1912, two German scientists used von Baeyer’s acid to synthesize a new drug, barbitol. What they were looking for was a dr