The Demon Under the Microscope

I am the only person I know who loves the kind of non-fiction book that is The Demon Under the Microscope by Thomas Hager (subtitled From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug...the non-fiction books of this ilk that I like always seem to have subtitles that are longer than the titles...and longer than chapters in some fiction books!) If nothing else, these types of non-fiction tell me how little I know, despite how much I have learned.

Think for a moment about my sinus infection followed by stomach affliction. Annoying? Irritating? Inconvenient? Yes to all of the above, but at no time did it cross my mind that I might die. On behalf of most of the Moms I know, I will admit that I have taken a child to the doctor with a sore throat and said the following out loud, "Well, I kind of hope it's strep so they can just put him/her on an antibiotic and he/she will be able to go back to school in a day or so." Well, when our grandparents were small children...people DIED from strep! In large numbers! Something like 1 in 4 women who gave birth in certain hospitals died from something called "childbed fever". More people in WWI died from infection than from war wounds. In WW1, Gonorrhea (the clap) was second only to the flu as a cause of disability and absence from duty.

This was in a time when people had electricity, cars, telephones and movies...but they could not cure easily transmittable diseases from which people died!

The simple solution to these infections and diseases was a class of drugs using Sulfa as the active ingredient. The story of how these drugs were discovered, developed, tested and used spans several decades and countries and had far-reaching effects on our current system of drug research and testing. At the beginning of the Sulfa era, people were still buying "patent medicines" which were unproven at best and dangerous or fatal at worst. The country's food and drug laws had no teeth...a perfect example being when a drug was found to have killed almost 100 people, the company which produced it could not be tried for negligence or murder, but could be tried for mislabeling!

The story is fascinating. The "characters" involved are as complex, heroic and villainous as characters in fiction. And the narrative moves along at a clip that fiction readers can deal with.

The Demon Under the Microscope is meticulously researched without those annoying footnotes on every page. Hager instead adds a chapter entitled "Source Notes" which describes where he got the information on a chapter by chapter basis, followed by an extensive bibliography. As a non-technical reader of the book, this is much more helpful and keeps the book from being bogged down in details that would only be of interest to other researchers.

To Amy and Laura, whose husbands are in the pharmaceutical industry and Karen who is herself in the pharmaceutical realm, I think this book would be a great read. And for others who, like me, just have a weird appreciation of these kinds of historical NON-fiction...definitely a good addition to your library.

And, if you don't read the book, please take this from my review...trust me, when the doctor prescribes 7 days or 10 days of an antibiotic...take every single one. It really does mean something!

Di

Comments

[Shirley]

Gosh Di, I learned a lot just reading your review

[booklogged]

This sounds very interesting. I enjoy nonfiction, too, but just haven't been in the mood lately. I'm putting this on my list for later. Thanks for the great suggestion.

[el-e-e]

Don't know if you just enjoy non fiction on this topic -- also don't know if I've mentioned it to you before, or on my blog -- but Myla Goldberg's fictional account of the early 1900s flu epidemic is similarly fascinating. It's called Wickett's Remedy. Highly recommended by me!