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From Aspirin to Viagra: Stories of the Drugs that Changed the World
From Aspirin to Viagra, insulin to penicillin, and vaccines to vitamin supplements, drugs have become part of our everyday lives. This staggering global industry wasn’t born overnight; advancements in pharmaceutical science have been happening for a long while, over the course of decades and even centuries.
This book tells the history of ten prominent substances and how they came to be common household names. It shows how the creation of such influential drugs often began with the right person at the exactly right―or wrong!― time. The chapters tell the stories of geniuses and charlatans; scholars and amateurs; advances won through hard work or pure luck; and ultimately, the handful of resounding successes that revolutionized a global industry.
Beyond the pioneers of the most famous drugs in our culture, the book analyzes how our perspective on medical treatment has shifted over the decades. Modern standards for testing and administering substances have created a new set of advantages, setbacks, and stigmas, all of which are discussed herein.
This book tells the history of ten prominent substances and how they came to be common household names. It shows how the creation of such influential drugs often began with the right person at the exactly right―or wrong!― time. The chapters tell the stories of geniuses and charlatans; scholars and amateurs; advances won through hard work or pure luck; and ultimately, the handful of resounding successes that revolutionized a global industry.
Beyond the pioneers of the most famous drugs in our culture, the book analyzes how our perspective on medical treatment has shifted over the decades. Modern standards for testing and administering substances have created a new set of advantages, setbacks, and stigmas, all of which are discussed herein.
288 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 2020
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March 14, 2021
Book: From Aspirin to Viagra: Stories of the Drugs that Changed the World
Author: Vladimir Marko
Publisher: Springer; 1st ed. 2020 edition (7 July 2020)
Language: English
Paperback: 276 pages
Item Weight: 492 g
Dimensions: 16.79 x 1.55 x 24 cm
Price: 2316/-
This was the last book that I thought I’d read. A topic as dowdy as the record of Medicines? Phew!!
Nevertheless, by the time I had reached the midpoint of this 276 page tome, my predetermined inspirations had changed. I had already become an objective reader.
The whole credit would go to the style of narration, packed with anecdotes and accounts and lots and lots of sassy hearsay and suppositions that the author has punched into the text!!
Well, to begin with, the drugs we know of today have a short history. Until the 19th century, official medicine had no actual need for these drugs.
For many centuries, opening from ancient times, ailments were thought to be caused by a disparity of four basic bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.
Doctors were meant to rebalance these fluids through methods like bloodletting, the employ of leeches, serving laxatives, enemas, or substances inducing vomiting.
Over the course of one year, the French King Louis XIII received 212 enemas, was induced to vomit 215 times and underwent bloodletting 47 times.
His son and heir, Louis XIV, was rumored to have undergone more than 200,000 enemas, sometimes as many as four a day.
The French playwright J.B. Molière illustrated the condition with official medicine very well in one of his plays: “(Doctors) can talk fine Latin, can give a Greek name to every disease, can define and distinguish them; but as to curing these diseases, that’s out of the question.”
Those who were reliant on the help of this kind of medicine were more or less out of luck.
When George Washington became ill in 1799 and began to grumble of neck pain, the medical help that was called upon did everything within their capacity to assist.
They induced blisters and let his blood. He ended up losing about two and a half liters of blood, but despite—or more likely because—of this treatment, George Washington died ten hours later.
It was much easier for the common people. They would often seek help from the unsanctioned medicine practiced mostly by village women.
These healers were not interested in the official teachings of bodily fluids. Instead, they would focus more on the objects that they found around themselves.
They knew of the properties of many diverse flowers and herbs and would use them to cure diseases, although this came at the risk of being accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake.
Some of these methods are still used today.
An example of the difference between official and unofficial medicine was the approach to treating scurvy in the 18th century. Scurvy, as we now know, is a disease caused by the deficiency of vitamin C. Official medicine said that it was caused by a disease of the black bile, which they considered to be dry and cold.
For this reason, they considered it essential to treat it with something warm and moist, such as a broth brewed of barley. They did not use citrus fruits because these were also cold.
A Miss Mitchell from Hasfield, located in the province of the Duchy of Gloucestershire, knew nothing of black bile and instead used a mixture of medicinal herbs, wine and orange juice to treat scurvy.
This book contains stories from the history of ten different drugs that have to a great degree influenced humanity.
They are, in alphabetic order: aspirin, chlorpromazine, contraceptive pills, insulin, penicillin, Prozac, quinine, vaccines, Viagra, and vitamin C.
The selection of these drugs is often subjective. The author avers that his ‘intent was not to describe the drugs as such, but instead to map the road that was taken to their discovery or invention’.
Vladimir Marko has divided his book into the following ten sections and a conclusion:
1. Aspirin
2. Quinine
3. Vitamin C
4. Insulin
5. Penicillin
6. The Pill
7. Chlorpromazine
8. Prozac
9. Viagra
10. Vaccines
11. Conclusion
Marko makes a straightforward admission that ‘the road was often rough, but also adventurous’. At the same time, the author looked to record the circumstances associated with their subsequent life.
What is it then that this book tells you of?
It tells you the following:
1) This book is about the people who chose this path. The majority of them, with the exception of a few impostors, were inspired by their profound need to help others and by their conviction that what they were doing was the right thing, even if by today’s standards their methods were harsh.
By the time you have completed reading the last of the 56 stories about the history of ten medicines, you would realize that these stories convey the destinies of nearly 100 heroes.
Apart from an abortionist, a wrongly-accused spy, and one colossal quack, they were all people whose inputs not only gave us those ten medicines, but many others too.
2) This remarkable book tells you that the history of medicine is not only sated with incredible discoveries, daring theories, and good decisions, but there are also copious dead ends, erroneous hypotheses, and simple human errors. The latter outnumber the former.
3) The book tells you that the history of medicine is hardly ever linear; it is more of a roundabout path, full of twists and turns, along which people throughout history have walked or run toward their goal of eradicating diseases from our lives.
4) This book tells you that one can contentedly say that in most cases, they reached their goal, at least as far as Western civilization is concerned. Humans no longer die of tuberculosis, syphilis, or other infectious diseases. Humans do not have to worry that a minor scrape might get infected and potentially be fatal.
5) This book tells you how the epidemics of smallpox, measles, typhoid fever, and many other diseases are things of the past, better left to the history books.
6) This book tells you, how women were freed to plan their lives without the imperative to conceive children.
7) This book tells you that in fact, even medical students can only look to pictures in textbooks to learn about the greatest contagions in human history. We have been afforded a luxury that people 100 years ago could not even imagine which is that we do not have to worry that tomorrow we will get sick and die.
Perceptibly, it is not that simple.
New diseases have taken the place of those that we managed to get under control. Infectious diseases have handed off the baton to diseases of affluence. We also have a much longer life expectancy than our ancestors did, so we face problems of old age that they never had to.
While the average person born in Europe 100 years ago could only look forward to about 50 years of life, today that number is 80 and higher.
Finally, this book ends with a response expressed by one of its heroes, Sir Ronald Ross, who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 and was the protagonist in one of the stories about quinine. It doubtless best characterizes most of the crusaders against the diseases, to whose memory this book is dedicated. He said:
“Medical discovery, like all discovery, requires two rather rare qualities − an acute instinct for the right direction and a burning perseverance in following it up.”
I was mesmerized by many of the facts that I learnt.
Grab a copy if you choose.
Author: Vladimir Marko
Publisher: Springer; 1st ed. 2020 edition (7 July 2020)
Language: English
Paperback: 276 pages
Item Weight: 492 g
Dimensions: 16.79 x 1.55 x 24 cm
Price: 2316/-
This was the last book that I thought I’d read. A topic as dowdy as the record of Medicines? Phew!!
Nevertheless, by the time I had reached the midpoint of this 276 page tome, my predetermined inspirations had changed. I had already become an objective reader.
The whole credit would go to the style of narration, packed with anecdotes and accounts and lots and lots of sassy hearsay and suppositions that the author has punched into the text!!
Well, to begin with, the drugs we know of today have a short history. Until the 19th century, official medicine had no actual need for these drugs.
For many centuries, opening from ancient times, ailments were thought to be caused by a disparity of four basic bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.
Doctors were meant to rebalance these fluids through methods like bloodletting, the employ of leeches, serving laxatives, enemas, or substances inducing vomiting.
Over the course of one year, the French King Louis XIII received 212 enemas, was induced to vomit 215 times and underwent bloodletting 47 times.
His son and heir, Louis XIV, was rumored to have undergone more than 200,000 enemas, sometimes as many as four a day.
The French playwright J.B. Molière illustrated the condition with official medicine very well in one of his plays: “(Doctors) can talk fine Latin, can give a Greek name to every disease, can define and distinguish them; but as to curing these diseases, that’s out of the question.”
Those who were reliant on the help of this kind of medicine were more or less out of luck.
When George Washington became ill in 1799 and began to grumble of neck pain, the medical help that was called upon did everything within their capacity to assist.
They induced blisters and let his blood. He ended up losing about two and a half liters of blood, but despite—or more likely because—of this treatment, George Washington died ten hours later.
It was much easier for the common people. They would often seek help from the unsanctioned medicine practiced mostly by village women.
These healers were not interested in the official teachings of bodily fluids. Instead, they would focus more on the objects that they found around themselves.
They knew of the properties of many diverse flowers and herbs and would use them to cure diseases, although this came at the risk of being accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake.
Some of these methods are still used today.
An example of the difference between official and unofficial medicine was the approach to treating scurvy in the 18th century. Scurvy, as we now know, is a disease caused by the deficiency of vitamin C. Official medicine said that it was caused by a disease of the black bile, which they considered to be dry and cold.
For this reason, they considered it essential to treat it with something warm and moist, such as a broth brewed of barley. They did not use citrus fruits because these were also cold.
A Miss Mitchell from Hasfield, located in the province of the Duchy of Gloucestershire, knew nothing of black bile and instead used a mixture of medicinal herbs, wine and orange juice to treat scurvy.
This book contains stories from the history of ten different drugs that have to a great degree influenced humanity.
They are, in alphabetic order: aspirin, chlorpromazine, contraceptive pills, insulin, penicillin, Prozac, quinine, vaccines, Viagra, and vitamin C.
The selection of these drugs is often subjective. The author avers that his ‘intent was not to describe the drugs as such, but instead to map the road that was taken to their discovery or invention’.
Vladimir Marko has divided his book into the following ten sections and a conclusion:
1. Aspirin
2. Quinine
3. Vitamin C
4. Insulin
5. Penicillin
6. The Pill
7. Chlorpromazine
8. Prozac
9. Viagra
10. Vaccines
11. Conclusion
Marko makes a straightforward admission that ‘the road was often rough, but also adventurous’. At the same time, the author looked to record the circumstances associated with their subsequent life.
What is it then that this book tells you of?
It tells you the following:
1) This book is about the people who chose this path. The majority of them, with the exception of a few impostors, were inspired by their profound need to help others and by their conviction that what they were doing was the right thing, even if by today’s standards their methods were harsh.
By the time you have completed reading the last of the 56 stories about the history of ten medicines, you would realize that these stories convey the destinies of nearly 100 heroes.
Apart from an abortionist, a wrongly-accused spy, and one colossal quack, they were all people whose inputs not only gave us those ten medicines, but many others too.
2) This remarkable book tells you that the history of medicine is not only sated with incredible discoveries, daring theories, and good decisions, but there are also copious dead ends, erroneous hypotheses, and simple human errors. The latter outnumber the former.
3) The book tells you that the history of medicine is hardly ever linear; it is more of a roundabout path, full of twists and turns, along which people throughout history have walked or run toward their goal of eradicating diseases from our lives.
4) This book tells you that one can contentedly say that in most cases, they reached their goal, at least as far as Western civilization is concerned. Humans no longer die of tuberculosis, syphilis, or other infectious diseases. Humans do not have to worry that a minor scrape might get infected and potentially be fatal.
5) This book tells you how the epidemics of smallpox, measles, typhoid fever, and many other diseases are things of the past, better left to the history books.
6) This book tells you, how women were freed to plan their lives without the imperative to conceive children.
7) This book tells you that in fact, even medical students can only look to pictures in textbooks to learn about the greatest contagions in human history. We have been afforded a luxury that people 100 years ago could not even imagine which is that we do not have to worry that tomorrow we will get sick and die.
Perceptibly, it is not that simple.
New diseases have taken the place of those that we managed to get under control. Infectious diseases have handed off the baton to diseases of affluence. We also have a much longer life expectancy than our ancestors did, so we face problems of old age that they never had to.
While the average person born in Europe 100 years ago could only look forward to about 50 years of life, today that number is 80 and higher.
Finally, this book ends with a response expressed by one of its heroes, Sir Ronald Ross, who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 and was the protagonist in one of the stories about quinine. It doubtless best characterizes most of the crusaders against the diseases, to whose memory this book is dedicated. He said:
“Medical discovery, like all discovery, requires two rather rare qualities − an acute instinct for the right direction and a burning perseverance in following it up.”
I was mesmerized by many of the facts that I learnt.
Grab a copy if you choose.
Displaying 1 of 1 review