The central subject of The Demon Under The Microscope (Thomas Hager, 2006) is how the discovery of sulfa antibiotics altered the course of history forever.
Sulfa Antibiotics and Modern Life
Any person in the modern world who has gone through labor and survived the process, grown up with siblings who are all still alive, had strep throat and not died of it, may have Gerhard Domagk and his colleagues at I.G. Farben (yes, this firm became a Nazi chemical company, later in its life) to thank – though Domagk and sulfa may not be as familiar as Fleming and penicillin.
To illustrate the huge, thunderous difference in living before and after this discovery, Hager tells the heartbreaking story of Herbert Hoover's son, who died of an infection caused by a simple cut; later in the story, Franklin D. Roosevelt's son falls ill with a simple sinus infection– and takes sulfa, and survives. The wave that breaks over the world is just as quick as that, and just as stunning.
A Symphony of History
Although we might know the outcome going in, Hager's prose manages to create the effect of suspense through a series of related stories: the minor infections of children, the survival rate of women in childbirth, the scourge of gangrene in World War I. The discovery itself is simply the climax of a symphony of history, each note of which builds on the previous tone.
The first sulfa drug temporarily turned people's skin bright red, because it was bound up with an aniline dye. The sulfa drugs we take today do not have this peculiar side effect, but the story of the dye industry still leads back to some of the very beginnings of organic chemistry: a little-known Scottish inventor, William Murdoch, discovered coal gas, which was then used for gas lamps - and the process made various odd byproducts, which were some of the first synthetic organic compounds produced and used, and that is where those aniline dyes came from.
That same story leads forward into the not-entirely-savory modern legacy of drug companies and how pharmacology became big business.
How the FDA Was Made
And then, finally, the aftermath: the most haunting chapter is on the tragedy of Massengill's Sulfanilamide Elixir, a preparation whose active ingredient was the miracle drug and whose "inactive" ingredient was lethally poisonous to hundreds of children and adults, mostly poor and mostly African-American. Propylene glycol is a mostly inert substance, used as a filler in many syrup medicines even today; ethylene glycol (in this case diethylene glycol) is an antifreeze compound, and causes death by central nervous system and kidney damage. This incident directly led to the Food, Drug & Cosmetic act of 1938.
Ultimately, the great strength of this book is how everything in it connects to everything else, how each individual story lies like buried treasure under a layer of equally valuable others.
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