The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it.
It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly
launched the era of antibiotics. This incredible discovery
was sulfa, the first antibiotic. In The Demon Under the
Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history
of the drug that shaped modern medicine.
Sulfa saved
millions of lives—among them those of Winston Churchill and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.—but its real effects are even
more far reaching. Sulfa changed the way new drugs were
developed, approved, and sold; transformed the way doctors
treated patients; and ushered in the era of modern medicine.
The very concept that chemicals created in a lab could cure
disease revolutionized medicine, taking it from the
treatment of symptoms and discomfort to the eradication of
the root cause of illness.
A strange and colorful
story, The Demon Under the Microscope illuminates the
vivid characters, corporate strategy, individual idealism,
careful planning, lucky breaks, cynicism, heroism, greed,
hard work, and the central (though mistaken) idea that
brought sulfa to the world. This is a fascinating scientific
tale with all the excitement and intrigue of a great
suspense novel.
For thousands of years, humans
had sought medicines with which they could defeat contagion,
and they had slowly, painstakingly, won a few battles: some
vaccines to ward off disease, a handful of antitoxins. A
drug or two was available that could stop parasitic diseases
once they hit, tropical maladies like malaria and sleeping
sickness. But the great killers of Europe, North America,
and most of Asia—pneumonia, plague, tuberculosis,
diphtheria, cholera, meningitis—were caused not by parasites
but by bacteria, much smaller, far different microorganisms.
By 1931, nothing on earth could stop a bacterial infection
once it started. . . .
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