Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine's Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It
Druin Burch
Language: English
Pages: 330
ISBN: 1845951506
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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My interview preparation was largely non-existent. ‘What if they ask you why you want to be a doctor?’ suggested a friend. ‘They won’t ask me that,’ I explained. ‘Why would anyone ask such a dull question? They’ll only get identical answers about liking science and wanting to help people.’ ‘Why do you want to be a doctor?’ they asked me. Whatever I said has long passed from my memory. Probably the examiners were not even listening. To this day I think it was a bad question. Medicine seemed
Penicillium no different in concept to carbolic acid, bleach or the other antiseptics. Fleming’s official biographer noted the routine nature of what occurred, explaining that Fleming observed a mould that appeared to kill bacteria: ‘probably the mould was producing acids which were harmful to the staphylococci – no unusual occurrence.’ It was not an important event. A far more astonishing demonstration of Penicillium’s properties had already come in 1897. A Frenchman named Ernest Duchesne
microbes in the genesis of disease is now well-known to us: we know that, not only do they generate disease, but they can also be the remedy for it, either by their attenuated culture or by products that they secrete. Duchesne concluded that Penicillium, injected at the same time as a dose of typhoid, made the latter harmless. He thought that this was important. He died of tuberculosis in 1912, at the age of thirty-seven, without having convinced anyone or having continued his own work beyond
Merck, however, was still in charge. During the Second World War, George W. Merck showed his patriotism and his power. He did everything he could to help America win the war through pharmaceuticals. That meant sulfonamides, penicillin and, at Camp Detrick in Maryland, germ warfare. One of Merck’s efforts at discovering new antibiotics lay in the company’s funding of Selman Waksman. A Russian émigré, Waksman’s academic interest at Rutgers University was in soil microbiology. Inspired by
from the war, there was influenza. It infected a third of the global population. Abnormally severe, the outbreak was also peculiar in another way. Influenza, like other infections, tends to pick off the physically vulnerable – the very young and very old. This time was an exception. Of the millions who died, half were at the physical peak of their lives. Histories of aspirin record the effectiveness of the drug in dealing with influenza. Aspirin, wrote Diarmuid Jeffreys in 2004, ‘helped millions