The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug PDF

Rating: (40 reviews) Author: Visit Amazon's Thomas Hager Page ISBN : 9781400082148 New from $13.50 Format: PDF

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From Publishers Weekly

Modern bacteriology was born on the battlefields of WWI, where bacteria-rich trenches added to the toll of millions of soldiers killed. Not coincidentally, the search for anything that would significantly diminish the deadly power of disease largely occurred between the world wars, mostly in Germany. Gerhard Domagk and his colleagues at Bayer (a subsidiary of I.G. Farben) worked feverishly to identify which microscopic squiggles might render humankind forever safe from malaria and tuberculosis. The answer, discovered in 1932, turned out to be sulfa drugs, the precursors to modern antibiotics. Hager, a biographer of Linus Pauling, does a remarkable job of transforming material fit for a biology graduate seminar into highly entertaining reading. He knows that lay readers need plenty of personality and local color, and his story is rich with both. This yarn prefigures the modern rush for corporate pharma patents; it is testament to Hager's skill that the inherently unsexy process of finding the chemicals that might help conquer strep is as exciting as an account of the hunt for a Russian submarine. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–An exciting, fast-paced read, Demon opens with a grisly scene at Tripler General Hospital in Hawaii as ambulances, trucks, and private cars drop off the injured from Pearl Harbor. Men who were wounded, dismembered, and literally roasted in the harbor oil fires from exploding ships were tended to on the lawns outside the hospital and in three operating rooms that ran continuously for 11 hours. Not a single patient died due to infection, in dramatic contrast to World War I, when it was estimated that more soldiers died of infection than in combat. What was the difference? Sulfa drugs–antibiotics. The story of their discovery reads much like a suspense novel, set against the backdrop of World War I trench warfare and political intrigue in Europe leading up to World War II. The scientific leaders in medical research, Gerhard Domagk at Bayer, Sir Almroth Wright's group The Lords, and Ernest Fourneau at the Pasteur Institute, conducted meticulous work and experienced accidental discoveries that advanced medical procedures and determined the protocols for drug testing. Great reading both for curriculum support and general interest.–Brigeen Radoicich, Fresno County Office of Education, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
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• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Books (August 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400082145
• ISBN-13: 978-1400082148
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug PDF

On behalf of most of the Moms I know, I will admit that I have taken a child to the doctor with a sore throat and said the following out loud, "Well, I kind of hope it's strep so they can just put him/her on an antibiotic and he/she will be able to go back to school in a day or so." Well, when our grandparents were small children...people DIED from strep! In large numbers! Something like 1 in 4 women who gave birth in certain hospitals died from something called "childbed fever". More people in WWI died from infection than from war wounds. In WW1, Gonorrhea (the clap) was second only to the flu as a cause of disability and absence from duty.

This was in a time when people had electricity, cars, telephones and movies...but they could not cure easily transmittable diseases from which people died!

The simple solution to these infections and diseases was a class of drugs using Sulfa as the active ingredient. The story of how these drugs were discovered, developed, tested and used spans several decades and countries and had far-reaching effects on our current system of drug research and testing. At the beginning of the Sulfa era, people were still buying "patent medicines" which were unproven at best and dangerous or fatal at worst. The country's food and drug laws had no teeth...a perfect example being when a drug was found to have killed almost 100 people, the company which produced it could not be tried for negligence or murder, but could be tried for mislabeling!

The story is fascinating. The "characters" involved are as complex, heroic and villainous as characters in fiction. And the narrative moves along at a clip that fiction readers can deal with.

The Demon Under the Microscope is meticulously researched without those annoying footnotes on every page.

Some dolt on a bicycle slammed into me yesterday. Fortunately I did not break any bones, but the bruises are giving me an uncomfortable time since then. After rinsing both knees with chlorhexidine and iodine, I was not concerned; if there was an infection, antibiotics would take care of it.

But it wouldn't have been that way seventy years ago, when the most you could do to prevent a wound from getting infected...was wait, and perhaps apply some crude remedies. That was how it had been for two hundred years. For all the progress we had made, bad bugs still mostly got the better of us. It is appalling that about fifty percent of deaths in WW1 were from infections that riddled shrapnel wounds, and not from explosives or gunfire themselves. Once infection set in and gas gangrene made its hideous appearance, all one could do was wait, and maybe hope that the suffering would end soon...until sulfa drugs appeared on the scene.

That era of sulfa drugs, and not the one of penicillin, was the first heroic age of antibiotics. Most of us, if asked to name the first wonder-drug antibiotic, would name penicillin. But long before penicillin, sulfa saved thousands of lives. Without sulfa around, Hoover's son died. With sulfa, FDR's son, and Winston Churchill, survived. Thomas Hager has done an excellent job in bringing this forgotten but extremely important story to life in "The Demon Under the Microscope". The former biographer of Linus Pauling has shown us how different it was to suddenly have a drug that cured infections that previously would have almost certainly killed you.