Word: sulfa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...over a two-year period in the treatment of 7,000 patients. And behind its discovery and development was the potent name of Professor Gerhard Domagk, 54, who won fame-and a 1939 Nobel Prize, which the Nazis would not let him take-as top man in perfecting the sulfa drugs...
...dreaded diseases are caused by microorganisms, scientists have searched for a drug that would kill the little villains without damaging the tissues of their human victims. A few chemical drugs were synthesized. Salvarsan, "606," developed by Ehrlich, proved to be effective against syphilis. Much later, in 1935, came the sulfa drugs, the medical wonders of their day. But none of the chemical "magic bullets" was effective against more than a few disease organisms, and all of them were apt to have dangerous toxic effects on human tissues...
Doctors are keenly aware that the antibiotics (sulfa drugs, penicillin, streptomycin, etc.) have two great dangers: 1) sometimes the drug has a poisonous effect on the patient, and 2) the bacteria under attack may develop a tolerance for the drug. Last week doctors at the 13th Congress of the International Society of Surgery in New Orleans were reminded of another danger: antibiotics speed up the clotting time of the blood, thus subject the patient to the risk of death from blood clots forming, breaking loose, and being carried through the heart into the lungs...
...there were 267,026 fewer deaths than the U.S. would have had if 1940 mortality rates had prevailed. Pneumonia and influenza suffered the sharpest defeat: penicillin and sulfa drugs saved about 57,000 from these diseases...
Still Kicking. Three days later, returning East aboard a Union Pacific streamliner, the ex-President was stricken with a gall bladder attack. He had to wait five painful hours until a doctor could meet the train at Elko, Nev., give him shots of morphine, sulfa and penicillin. While ambulances and doctors stayed alerted all along the railroad to Chicago, Hoover, after a few hours' sleep, recovered fast enough to resume his gin rummy with his secretary. To a reporter who called on him, he said crisply: "I guess you just wanted to see if I was kicking...