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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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