the demon under the microscope by thomas hager

But a hundred years ago it was vastly different. If we get an infection, we get antibiotics and expect it to go away quickly. I don’t know about you, but I tend to take for granted many of the medical treatments we have today. It was so well done, easy to read, and interesting that I’ve been through it twice now. After reading many reviews where people were raving about it (nearly 1600 so far between Audible and Amazon), I decided to give it a try. I didn’t think I was particularly interested in science.

I’m a fiction reader, probably eighty percent of the time, so I put off reading this for quite awhile. It became a race between nations, for both discovery and credit. The story centers around Gerhard Domagk, a German scientist whose career was inspired by the deaths of nearly all the soldiers in his battalion during WW1, as many from infection as from war wounds. Demon under the Microscope is the story of the men behind the discovery of antibiotics. This is a fascinating scientific tale with all the excitement and intrigue of a great suspense novel.A book about science that reads almost like a novel? That’s what I found in this excellent book by Thomas Hager. 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. 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. 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.

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. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of sulfa, the first antibiotic and the drug that shaped modern medicine.

The demon under the microscope by thomas hager