[book_talk] book review - Thomas Hager
- From: "Bonnie L. Sherrell" <blslarner@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Blind Chit Chat" <Blind-Chit-Chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Books for the Blind" <Books4theblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Blind Book Lovers Cafe" <bblc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Book Talk" <book_talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2014 10:27:52 -0800
_The Demon Under the Microscope_
by Thomas Hager
narrated by Stephen Hoye
Gustav Dornach interrupted his medical training to enter the German
Army in World War One, and swiftly learned that the bullets fired by
the enemy were the least of his fellows' miseries. It was infections
that killed the most soldiers on all sides. Fighting as they were
primarily on farmlands, the soil was rich with manure left by stock and
used as fertilizers, and bacteria got into everything. As he served as
a medical assistant on the Eastern Front, Dornach vowed that he would
do all he could to find some chemical cure so that gas gangrene and
other bacterial infections would not continue to wreak havoc on people
who had suffered wounds they could easily be expected to recover from.
By the late twenties Dornach was licensed as a physician, but he was
still stubbornly determined to find a chemical cure for bacterial
infections. Work at prestigious universities in Germany did not give
him the financial support he needed, so when he was offered a job at
the Baier Corporation to head a research team in search of chemical
cures for common diseases he accepted. A red chemical dye had proved
useful in fighting sleeping sickness and certain infections when used
in African campaigns; surely further tinkering with the molecule for
the dye would lead to more miracle cures?
At about the time Adolph Hitler was rising to prominence in Munich and
Germany as a whole, Dornach's research chemists came up with a
variation of the dye molecule to which a sulfa compound was added that
did nothing to kill bacteria in cultures, but that offered miraculous
cures to laboratory mice and later rabbits that had been deliberately
infected with virulent strains of streptococcus bacteria. The rest of
the world was slow to accept this new drug, particularly as it had the
unfortunate side effect of turning the skin of its recipients red after
taking a few doses. But once French and British medical researchers
and chemists began experimenting with the same basic chemical
structures, it was soon learned that it wasn't the dye part of the
molecule that fought the infections, but instead the sulfa compound
that had been attached to it.
This fascinating book follows the history of sulfa drugs from the
earliest days of biochemical research to the days when sulfa drugs were
supplanted by penicillin and other such antibiotics, as well as the
trials and tribulations of Dornach, who was forbidden to accept the
Nobel Prize he won for his research by an embittered Fuhrer, as he
struggled to see his discovery accepted and generally used to fight
back against the most aggressive killer in any war--infections in
wounds. As the reviewer for Audible puts it, "The Nazis discovered it.
The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws,
and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics." Perhaps if
Hitler had been less of an ideologue the Nazis, too, would have
equipped their soldiers with sulfa drugs as did the British and
Americans, and the war might have turned out far differently.
Got this on sale at Audible and I definitely recommend it. You might
particularly appreciate it, Tim.
Bonnie L. Sherrell
Teacher at Large
"Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise
cannot see all ends." LOTR
"Don't go where I can't follow."
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