A rousing, valuable contribution to the history of medicine.
The fascinating story of the world’s first antibiotic.
Science-writer Hager (Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, 1995) asserts that sulfa, which was eventually displaced as a miracle drug by penicillin, holds a unique place in the history of medical science. It banished the notion, widely held among doctors, that chemicals would never be able to cure most diseases; it established the research methods for finding new drugs; and it created the business model for developing them. Hager’s account opens on the battlefields of World War II, where wound infection was a gruesome killer, then moves to postwar Germany, where industrial chemists manipulating azo dye molecules discovered that the addition of sulfanilamide (sulfa) created a chemical with bacteria-fighting properties. In England, doctors tried the new dye-based German wonder drug Prontosil on hospital patients; in France, researchers found that sulfa alone was the effective agent; and in the U.S., great quantities of sulfa-containing patent medicines were soon developed and marketed. The author enlivens his tale with a host of personalities, including German industrialist Carl Duisberg, head of the Bayer company; Heinrich Horlein, who ran Bayer’s pharmaceutical division; researcher Gerhard Domagk, whose work won him a Nobel Prize, which the Nazis would not permit him to accept; and French chemist Ernest Fourneau, whose discovery of the power of sulfa on its own greatly dismayed the German makers of Prontosil. Hager also provides a vivid picture of Germany at the peak of its prestige in the international scientific community and of a very different country under the Nazis. Of special interest is the cautionary tale of the Massengill Company’s Elixir Sulfanilamide, which contained an industrial solvent and killed more than 100 people in the U.S. This disaster led to an overhaul of the nation’s drug laws, including passage of the 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. It put an end, the author states, to the era of patent medicines and launched the age of antibiotics.
A rousing, valuable contribution to the history of medicine.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8213-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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