The History of Medicine: Recent Episodes
Kirby Gong
Explore the rich history of medicine, from the diseases that once plagued us, how the medicine we take for granted today came to be, and the curious characters and stories surrounding these topics. Updates every week, with breaks between seasons for additional research and planning. Our current topic: Pain. Episodes to resume in early October 2021! Past Season's topics: Season 1 - Antibiotics. Season 2 - Surgery/Anesthesia. Season 3 - Public Health. Season 4 - Mental Illness. Season 5 - Pain.
This week, we talk about the highlights of neurological understanding, spanning from Ancient Egypt to the Romans to Medieval Islamic surgeons.
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Good evening everyone. As you can tell, I've been gone for a bit longer that expected, for which I apologize. But I bear good news, I am all done getting married, and life has mostly settled down to normalcy again, so I've had time to do some research. I did previously settle on the history of physical rehabilitation as my next topic, but it's been tough to turn up reliable sources, so I'm likely to switch topics. If you've got an idea for a season topic, let me know in the next week or two! My current plan is to ease my way back into making episodes, probably with one a month for a few months, and then meander my way back to biweekly or weekly episodes. I'm excited to bring new episodes back, and I hope you are too. Thank you for listening, and I hope the wait will be worth it.
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https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19hHEgjSdLvSjsd6K3frEFSD1p_fnFKpM?usp=sharing
Good evening everyone. As you can tell, I've been gone for even longer than expected, and I am sorry for that. I love doing this podcast, but it is a hobby for me. Between my research being very busy, wedding planning absolutely kicking my butt, and also throwing out my back for a week, it just hasn't been possible to get this season going yet. I'm still receiving mail from some of y'all, which as always makes me very happy. I hope to be back soon, as my back is all better now, and wedding planning should calm down in the next month or so as we get all of our vendors lined up. Thank you for your patience, and I hope the wait will be worth it.
Good evening everyone. As you can tell, I've been gone for a bit longer that expected, for which I apologize. I unfortunately also will need to extend my hiatus even longer. I did settle on the history of physical rehabilitation as my next topic, and have begun some research, but that was all de-railed by my fiance getting sick for a bit although she's fine now, and speaking of, I also got engaged. Turns out wedding planning is a lot of work, especially as supply chains are all messed up from Covid, but we're getting some help with that soon and so I hope to be back to our regular weekly schedule in several weeks. Thank you for listening, and I hope that the wait will be worth it.
This week, we talk about the potential future of pain management. We talk about how opioids might be improved upon, and about how interdisciplinary approaches might become more accessible for all.
If you've got topic ideas for the next season, send them my way!
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In our 2nd to last episode this season, let's talk about the development of functional restoration, and the tiny rise and fall of specialty pain clinics, all of which happened alongside the opioid crisis.
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Good evening everyone. As happens here and there, some extra responsibilities and some holidays have snuck up on me. This past week, I’ve been swamped with work, and this upcoming week I’ve got numerous Passover activities, and so this week’s episode will be unfortunately delayed. If you’re wondering why I’m celebrating Passover despite my last name being Asian, the answer is that my girlfriend’s family is Jewish, and so I’m participating with them. Thank you for your patience, and next week, we’ll be back with a new episode.
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Thanks for waiting. This week, we talk about the origins of the current opioid crisis. It began with a drug called OxyContin, a reformulation of the existing opioid oxycodone, and many, many mistakes from physicians, researchers, regulators, and companies. The consequences were to be disastrous, and we are still dealing with them today.
Purdue Pharma OxyContin Commercial
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Good evening everyone, Kirby here. I apologize, but I’m going to put off this week’s episode in order to release a bigger, better episode for next week to make up for it. This episode will cover the origins of the modern opioid epidemic, which gets quite complex, and I haven’t found a place I think would be a good place to stop writing the episode. So, I decided I won’t. Thank you for your patience!
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This episode, we catch up on some developments in the world of opioids while we've been away from it. Oxycodone gets developed, and plays a role in World War II. Methadone is discovered, and ironically becomes a treatment for opioid addiction, and finally, fentanyl is created and abused.
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This week, we learn about John Bonica, a world-famous wrestler, and then a world-famous doctor and pain researcher, and all around an extraordinary individual.
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This week, we talk about Wilbert Fordyce, a pioneer in applying psychological research to preventing pain. You may have heard of operant conditioning before, but have you heard of using it for chronic pain reduction?
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Hello everyone, Kirby here. Sorry but I cannot get an episode up this week. Between a some personal matters and my internet being down for an entire day, my week has been very chaotic, and this week’s episode is unfinished. I’m hoping to resume like usual next week. Bear with me, and thank you for your patience. Be back soon!
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This week, we learn about Stewart Adams, who helped discover ibuprofen, one of the most important painkilling medications today.
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This week, we talk about the very long journey of acetaminophen/paracetamol, from its discovery in the late 1800s to its eventual widespread use in modern times. This journey is filled with mistakes and mishaps, but eventually the drug does make it out.
Part 1 of my interview on the NoiseFilter podcast
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Sorry for the delay, I took a week off for Lunar New Year!
This episode, we talk about some of the applications of Melzack and Wall's Gate Theory of Pain. A whole bunch of doctors, scientists, and engineers got interested in zapping away our pain again, and the implantable nerve stimulator for pain was born.
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This week, let's learn about Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall, two very different successors to Livingston who together published the very influential gate control theory of pain.
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Today, we talk about some ways that pain was thought about before the 20th century, and then William K Livingston, who combined a lot of that thinking and set up our modern understanding of pain.
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We're back! Sorry, the last few weeks were crazy, between a Covid exposure and the holidays. This week, let's talk about some of the pain treatments that replaced opioid drugs in the late 1800s and early 1900s; electrotherapy, and neurosurgery.
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This week, we talk about Silas Weir Mitchell, who was a doctor and researcher who first studied causalgia, or pain caused by nerve damage. He had a lot of accomplishments in his life, and a lot of tragedy too, and deserves to be remembered.
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This week, we return to talking about opioid drugs, this time discussing heroin, which is to replace morphine in many ways, good and bad.
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This week, we talk about the discovery of aspirin, going from willows to modern pills, with some drama in between.
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We continue the story of morphine, and detail its terrible effects on Americans after the Civil War, and how it fell out of favor.
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This week, we learn about morphine, and the one who first isolated it, Friedrich Serturner. It takes a while for folks to figure out how important it is, but this is just the beginning.
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This week, we advance to the Renaissance era with two stories: Willem ten Rhijne, who brought Eastern medicine to Europe, and William Sydenham who pioneered proprietary laudanum.
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This week we move onto the Medieval era, and look at the writings of some guy named some version of Nicolai, and Arabic surgeon Ibn al Quff to learn about what they were up to.
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We're back! And this season, we're exploring the history of treating pain, or pain management. As per usual, we start this off with an exploration of ancient techniques for dealing with pain, which honestly I'm pretty impressed by.
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This week, let's talk about what the future may hold when it comes to treating mental illness.
As always, I'm now taking a month-long hiatus to prepare for the next season. Be back soon!
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It turns out, complaining on the internet can be good for something.
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This week, we return to the DSM, the big book used by psychiatrists for diagnoses, which comes under fire, but now in the age of the internet, which we know can always make things interesting.
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This week, we learn about the influence of genes on mental illnesses.
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This week, we learn about the development of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the work of Aaron Beck, and finally get a lot better at talking to patients with mental illness.
Send Aaron Beck a birthday greeting for his 100th birthday!
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This week, we learn about Eric Kandel, who kickstarted researching brains to try to tackle mental illness. His weapon of choice: sea slugs.
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This week, we figure out how to look at brains.
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This week, we talk about Nathan Kline, who illustrates the new generation of psychiatrists that rose to prominence along with the new psychiatric drugs we've been talking about.
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This week, we learn about yet another psychiatric medication discovered by accident, this time by John Cade.
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This week, we'll learn about compound G22355, the first antidepressant, and how it was discovered through the weird stubbornness of one Roland Kuhn.
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This week, we learn about the first antipsychotic drug, chlorpromazine. It's another accidental discovery, that revolutionizes psychiatry.
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This week, we talk about the replacements for meprobamate, the first benzodiazepines, which got sold as Librium and Valium.
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This week, we learn about the first medications applied to psychiatric patients. It started off pretty rough with morphine, but eventually, in the 1950s we got the first tranquilizer drugs, which were a big deal.
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This week, we talk about convulsive therapy, or using seizures to treat mental illness, and then upgrade it using electricity.
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This week, we pick some people's brains... literally. Leucotomies AKA lobotomies were first tried in Portugal, but quickly spread. Probably a little too quickly, we can say with hindsight.
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This week, we finally start trying to treat severe mental illness. The earliest progress dates back to around the 1920s, which is when we started giving patients fevers on purpose, and dropping their blood sugar to induce comas. Not a great start.
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Sorry this is a little late, was a bit under the weather last week.
This episode, we talk about the creation of the Feigner criteria, which Spitzer used to radically change the DSM-III, and finally, the DSM-III gets released for real.
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This week, we learn about Robert Spitzer, who would someday lead the effort to create the third edition of the DSM. But first, we learn about his interesting path to involvement with the DSM at all, and his role in de-classifying homosexuality as a mental illness.
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This week, we talk about some of the weaknesses of the early DSM, namely that diagnosis was still pretty inconsistent, which leads to another credibility crisis for psychiatry.
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This week, the lack of standards for diagnosis cause problems for the US military, and finally the psychiatrists themselves, leading to the creation of the first edition of the DSM.
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This week we'll talk about the origins of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM for short. It starts with the United States census very unscientifically trying to study mental illness, and Emil Kraepelin fixing things up over in Europe.
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Sorry, no episode this week! My editor Jojo is sick, and I don't want to give her a big backlog of episodes to review until she's better. Stay safe everyone, and hopefully you'll hear from me next week.
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This week, we talk about how psychoanalysts take over the practice of psychiatry in the United States, successfully infiltrating the American Psychiatric Association, Hollywood, and even a little bit of the government.
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This week, Freud visits the United States... and very little changes, until the rise of the Nazis and World War II.
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This week, Freud goes on a war path, expelling all who disagree with him. No one is safe, even the founding members of the Wednesday Psychological Society.
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Thanks for waiting everyone. This week, we continue the saga of Sigmund Freud, and talk about how he first began to rise to prominence.
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Unfortunately, there’s not going to be an episode this week on account of me moving into a new house, and having a bunch of work suddenly appear over the weekend. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned; we'll be back to normal episodes next week.
This week, we start talking about Sigmund Freud, his earliest exploits in medicine, and then the basics of his psychoanalytic theory.
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This week, we talk about the alienists, and their reforms to asylums of the mid 1800s. Phillipe Pinel is to lay the groundwork, but still no major progress is made in terms of treatment of psychological disease.
A Painting of Pinel Releasing Patients
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This week, we talk about the biological psychiatry movement of the mid to late 1800s. Its most important discovery: Alzheimer's disease. And that's about it.
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We're back, with season 4, about mental illness. We'll start this week in the 1770s, with Franz Mesmer, who "discovered" animal magnetism, and accidentally actually discovered hypnosis.
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This week we'll wrap up the season with a discussion about the future of public health. We talk about recent trends and how things will probably go, regarding preventative and curative efforts.
Next season: Mental illness.
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This week, we re-visit international public health efforts, with the formation of the World Health Organization in 1948. We talk about some of their greatest achievements and responsibilities, and some of the recent controversies too.
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This week, we wrap up our episodes about health insurance by talking about the United States, and its rather complex mix of health insurance and delivery systems.
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This week, we cross the ocean to Canada, where the first nationalized health insurance was set up. It started in a province called Saskatchewan, and gained in popularity until it became a national program.
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This week, we learn about the Beveridge model, where a government fully runs the healthcare system. The earliest national attempts at such efforts start in the Soviet Union, but they are really implemented effectively by the Brits, culminating in the National Health Service.
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This week, we'll keep talking about health insurance. Two more really important government interventions lead to the further adaption of health insurance systems, one in Russia, and one in Germany.
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This week, we'll learn about the beginnings of health insurance. It's an annoying, but vital part of modern healthcare systems. It starts with informal community-organized societies, that basically were health insurance.
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This week, a whole bunch of scientists help figure out how vitamins and minerals work. That gets applied to preventing and curing lots of deficiency related diseases, like rickets, and saves/improves many lives.
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This week, we'll learn about how modern voluntary health organizations got started, by looking at the history of the National Tuberculosis Association. They pioneered fundraising techniques, created massive education campaigns, and basically established the playbook these organizations use to this day.
Donate to the American Lung Association!
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This week, we learn about some ways in the late 1800s to early 1900s that child welfare was improved. Milk gets a lot less dangerous, parents learn how to parent, and children are actually checked up on and fed, all very good things.
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This week, we see the practical effects of all the new science that we've been talking about for ages. We talk about Dr. William H Park, and Dr. Anna Williams, who were pioneers in applying the new discoveries to improve public health. And we talk about the big picture improvements as such practices spread.
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This week, we learn more about how immunization works, with the help of a whole lotta animal testing. All this improves the creation of vaccines, and opens up new treatment options.
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This week, we learn about how diseases are spread. Scientists of the last 1800s and early 1900s figure out that seemingly healthy people can still spread disease, and that not only people can spread disease, but other animals too. These are to have massive implications for future public health efforts.
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This week, we move into the bacteriological era. Let's learn about how we established that germs cause disease, and about where that might lead soon.
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This week, we'll talk about the first sanitary conference, which was an early attempt at international cooperation on public health issues. Unfortunately, it doesn't go that well, because of some scientific bickering.
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This week, we talk through some of the earliest laws that improved working conditions in the factories, at least for women and children. We also learn about some of the terrible conditions they were working in before that.
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This week, we talk about some of the changes that happened in response to the terrible living conditions many working-class people faced. New advocacy groups, government bodies, and regulations were created to help address these problems.
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This week we move into the mid 1800s, starting in England, where industrialization is in full swing. Along with it comes a bunch of pretty terrible worker conditions, which eventually become so bad it warrants government response. Let's talk about just how bad it can get.
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This week we discuss the origins of variolation, or deliberately infecting folks with smallpox to prevent more dangerous smallpox. Variolation then leads eventually to vaccination, and both become fairly wide spread by the mid 1800s, which is to be vital in the advancement of public health.
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This week, we revisit the state of public health. We have some new, really detailed plans from Johann Frank, and some new detailed plans established by the French government, that almost stick. We're getting closer to some actual health policy though!
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This week, we talk about institutional improvements in the 1750s-1830s, like hospitals and clinics, that follow some of the trends of the time, like more people and more urbanization. These expansions will also establish a pattern for social change in healthcare, that is to apply later in this season as well.
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This week, we reach the age of enlightenment, from about 1750 to 1830. And this week, we begin by saving a bunch of babies, with improvements in institutions for poor children, some new regulations, and a bit of new medical knowledge.
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This week, we finish up the Renaissance era with talk of how local administration of public health improved. We'll walk through some new ways to handle sewage, water supplies, and hospitals were handled in the era, and then sum things up.
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This week we talk through some new ideas in public health that rise in the 1500s-1700s. People propose collecting new statistics, and governments generally taking much more of an active role in maintaining public health.
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This week, we go over the advancements in understanding the causes of disease. Miasma theory continues to thrive, but also new ideas about tiny seeds causing disease spring up. We get very close to our modern understanding of germs, but fall just a bit short.
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This week, we'll talk about syphilis, which will illustrate an early example of a sexually transmitted disease, as well as how social factors like stigmas and geopolitics can affect public health.
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This week, we progress to the age of discovery, and learn about Bernardino Ramazzini, known as the father of occupational therapy. He studied over 50 types of jobs, and the health effects those jobs can have, and many of his findings are still useful to this day.
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Let's finish up with the Middle Ages this week. We'll talk about two illnesses that would shape public health in this time period, leprosy and the bubonic plague. Between them, a practice that we call quarantine will be born. Simultaneously, hospitals will spread across the land, bringing our time in the Middle Ages to a close.
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This week, we're in the Middle Ages, also known as the medieval era. We'll follow the state of public health knowledge from where it was under the Romans to the scattered city states that followed. Some knowledge was lost, but eventually many things are rediscovered, and some innovations were made, like some of the early regulations on food.
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Hello everyone, we're back, for season 3, about public health. As per usual, to start, we'll go over what was figured out in the earliest times, which I think you'll also find is a surprisingly good amount. We'll touch too a little on the work of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and then call it a day there.
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This week, we talk about the future of surgery. Virtual reality, augmented reality, 3-D printed organs, the future is exciting, and I look forward to seeing the field of surgery continue to develop.
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For our last historical topic of the season, we'll look at robotic surgery. It starts in the late 1980s, with new robots that could perform very specific tasks, like biopsies. The story continues to this very day, with modern surgeon-controlled surgery robots, that allow for safer and better surgeries than ever.
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This week, we'll continue our talk of prosthetics, but this time focused on joints. As it turns out, joint replacements have been around for a long time, thanks to some early pioneers like Themistocles Gluck, and Jules Pean. After them, you have a series of scientists and doctors trying out new materials, getting new pros and cons each time, but steadily improving, which continues to this very day.
Pean's Artificial Shoulder
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This week, part 1 of our talk of prosthetics. We talk about the ancient through modern history of limb prostheses, which starts out with peg legs, and evolves into incredibly complex operations and surgeries that can restore much of a patient's original limb functions.
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This week, just a little bit after Valentine's day, we learn to deal with rejection... organ transplant rejection, that is. We walk through the earliest experiments with internal organ transplant, through the pioneering work in the 50s with kidney transplants, and finally to the modern day.
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This week, we finish off our history of cardiac surgery. We invent two new procedures to deal with blockages in coronary arteries: one goes through the blockages, and the other goes around. Then, some brilliant folks invent pacemakers, and then implantable defibrillators.
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This week, we get to cardiac surgery. It starts with operations on the pericardium, lots of people getting stabbed in the chest, and for this week, ends with inducing hypothermia and using people as heart-lung machines.
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This week, we talk about lung surgery. it starts with Carlo Fornanini adding gas into the chest cavity, then doctors removing pus from the chest, even removing ribs to do it. Then, Willliam Macewen figures out intubation, and other folks bring us modern mechanical ventilators.
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We finally get around to neurosurgery this week. We have a whole lot of cameos, but also some new faces. Slowly but surely, doctors put together a rudimentary map of the brain and its function, and then we move to better and better actual operations. In modern times,we've got great imaging and diagnostic tools, and even interfaces with the brain directly.
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Let's look at our inner most selves... literally, with endoscopy. This week, Phillip Bozzini makes the light conductor, and others build upon his work, eventually yielding endoscopes. From there, a great many doctors, many gynecologists, create laparoscopy, using endoscopes with a surgical incision to investigate the inside of the body, and from there, we get modern laparoscopic surgery.
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I goofed up last time, we're actually going to talk about abdominal surgery this week. Abdominal surgery pretty much stems from two old operations. The first, colostomies, was proposed by Alex Littre, and then actually done by Claude Duret. The second, ovariotomies, or the removal of ovarian cysts, was pushed forward by Ephraim McDowell, despite much resistance.
Colostomy Image
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Let's finish up the story of plastic surgery this week. We left off in World War I, where Harold Gillies and William Lane will revolutionize facial restoration, gathering a team of specialists. Then, in World War II, Archibald McIndoe, one of Gillies' understudies, helps thousands of wounded soldiers with new treatments for burns, both surgical and psychological.
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This week, we talk about plastic surgery, at least up until the World Wars. It starts with fixing noses, but through the work of many a doctor, we improve our skin grafts quite a bit. We'll also talk about bone grafts, and the work of William Macewen.
Tubed Pedicle Graft Image
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Sorry in advance about audio quality issues. I've just gotten a new microphone, and am still ironing out the kinks. Anyway, this week, we'll talk about orthopedics, or the study of correcting bones and muscles. It starts with George Friedrich Louis Stromeyer, who invents new procedures for correcting club foot. Over many years, Hugh Owen Thomas and his nephew, Robert Jones, would carry the torch, and invent many a technique still in use today.
Club foot image
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This week, we talk about urology, the study of functions and disorders of the urinary system. Urology starts early on with lithotomies, or the removal of bladder stones, and then progresses to lithotrities, where the stones are crushed and washed out. We'll also talk about the origins of radiation therapy, which gets used for lots of urology-related cancers.
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This week, we talk about the development of electro cauterization, where you use heat to stop bleeding or cut more easily in surgery. We mostly have to thank William Bovie, who invented the device to do this, and Harvey Cushing, the pioneering neurosurgeon who first started using Bovie's tech, and convinced his fellow surgeons to follow suit.
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This week, we keep trying to figure out blood transfusions, in the pursuit of helping those with circulatory shock. Oswald Hope Robertson makes the first blood bank, Sergei Yudin starts the first cadaver blood bank, and Percy Lane Oliver founds the first blood donor service through the Red Cross. Finally, Landsteiner from last week returns, to describe the Rhesus factor.
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Let's learn about shock. We'll start with a whole bunch of scientists trying to figure out what it is, dating back literally to the Ancient Greeks. Even as we better our understanding of shock, we then have to treat it. The first good solution we come up with is blood transfusion, at least for bleeding-related shock, but even that has its complications.
Blundell's Blood Pump Apparatus
Higginson Syringe
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This week we'll begin talking about some of the innovations in surgery that we learn from the many wars that break out in the 20th century. To start, we'll take a look at wound treatment and infection prevention, featuring a whole cast of characters, with doctors from all over the world making advances.
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This week, let's talk about Wilhelm Konrad Rontgen, who discovers X-rays, an incredibly important technology for surgery. With his newly found technology, we can see bones and foreign objects inside our bodies for the first time, although of course a lot of work still has to be done to really bring the technology to fruition.
Albert von Kolliker's Hand X-ray
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This week, surgery will get a helping hand from some great scientists, who pave the way for the field of pathology, or the study of the causes of disease. We'll talk about James Paget, Rudolf Virchow, and Robert Koch, each of whom contributed significantly to our understanding and the diagnosis of diseases.
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We continue the achievements of Joseph Lister, who continues to innovate upon carbolic acid for literally decades. It takes time, but eventually a lot of other surgeons come around to his ideas, unlocking new possibilities for surgical procedures. Eventually, those evolve even further into aseptic methods, just keeping bacteria away instead of killing them, many of which we still use today.
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Now that anesthesia's been figured out, we still need to address the safety of surgery. Early on, infections were extremely common in surgical procedures, but this week we'll take our first steps towards correcting that, with the help of Joseph Lister, who invented antiseptic surgical techniques.
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While we're discussing anesthesia generally, let's talk about local anesthesia, where the patient is kept awake. The first local anesthetic to come into use widely was cocaine, thanks in large part to the work of Carl Koller, but also many others.
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This week, let's tackle one of those first big problems we talked about: the horrible pain of surgery. Many many doctors and scientists contributed, but eventually the solution is general anesthesia, or making a patient unconscious to avoid the pain. It starts with what were once recreational drugs, but eventually becomes ubiquitous, and is to have great benefits to surgery.
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This week, I want to go over the general state of surgery before the big innovations happen, around the 1800s. There's a lot to fix before we're anywhere near the surgery we know today, but we have to start somewhere.
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Here's one more bonus episode before the real season starts up next week. This one's about Robert Liston, a legendary surgeon of his time, and some crazy stories of his exploits and achievements, like his sub 30 second leg amputation. And that's just for starters!
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While researching for season 2, I stumbled upon this story that I felt absolutely deserved to be shared with all of you. We're not back yet with regular episodes, but I promise I'm hard at work! In the mean time, here's the story of Jan De Doot, a man with stones both figurative and literal.
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This week, we wrap up the season with antibiotic resistance. Since the inception of antibiotics, we've noticed resistance developing as well, but frankly haven't done much about it. I'll go through how we got here, and what we can still do about it.
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This week, I talk through the discoveries of a few leftover antibiotic classes. I didn't quite have enough for a full episode for each, but I still wanted to throw some credit around.
First up, we have glycopeptides, the first one being vancomycin. Edmund Kornfeld, working at Eli Lilly, is credited with the discovery.
The second class of drugs is quinolones, which are turned up by two companies simultaneously. George Lesher, at the firm Sterling-Winthrop, and Walter Hepworth, at Imperial Chemical Industries, both get some credit.
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This week, the tragedies of chloramphenicol coincide with the tragedy of thalidomide, an anti-nausea drug that unfortunately causes birth defects. The press caused by these events, political current events, and the efforts of an FDA regulator, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, eventually led to new legislation and standards, that helped create the FDA as we know it today.
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As promised, this week chloramphenicol begins to show some serious problems. Dr. Albe Watkins and Edgar Elfstrom both lost children, and push for new restrictions on the drug. They are at least somewhat successful, but the mid twentieth century is a different time from now, and it will take more tragedy before we begin to see bigger change.
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Next up, we discover the next big, broad-spectrum antibiotic. A company called Parke-Davis investigates medicines from around the world, and through the work of many scientists, they find yet another new bacteria, and another new drug. The drug is dubbed Chloromycetin, or chloramphenicol generically, and it will mark the beginning of the end of the golden age of antibiotics.
Nitrobenzene Structure
Chloromycetin/Choramphenicol Structure
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This week, we leave the US, and travel to the Phillipines, where we are still looking for new antibiotics in the dirt. One Dr. Abelardo Aguilar, working for the company Eli Lilly, eventually discover a new class of antibiotics, known as macrolides, and Robert Woodward Burns our genius chemist makes a re-appearance.
Erythromycin Structure
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This week we learn about a motley crew of great scientists and researchers, including Yellapragada Subbarao, Benjamin Duggar, and Alexander Finlay, from numerous companies, who all work to bring us our first antibiotics that target both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.
Aureomycin Structure
Terramycin Structure
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This week we take a short detour, to describe one application of Waksman and Schatz's work on streptomycin. Our hero this time is Austin Bradford Hill, a mathematician who, with innovative study design, is able to definitely prove that streptomycin can treat tuberculosis, a notoriously complicated disease.
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After Fleming and the Oxford gang kick off the antibiotic revolution, others are inspired, and seek new ways to discover their own antibiotics. Selman A Waksman assembles a team at Rutgers University, and discovers an entirely new way to find antibiotics. They create the next miracle drug, streptomycin, further increasing the reach of our medicines.
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This week, we finally bring penicillin to its full potential. A team of brilliant scientists at Oxford figure out how to mass-produce it, and Hodgkin figures out its structure. Penicillin saves millions, inspires a new future in medicine, and defines a number of great scientists' careers.
Images:
Heatley's purifier.
Beta Lactam's Structure.
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We finally come to penicillin. Alec Fleming stumbles upon a fungus contaminating one of his samples, and kicks off a long series of events that will lead to the best known antibiotic.
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This time, I tell the story of one Gerard Domagk. This brilliant scientist discovers one of the first antibiotics, which as a class of drugs come to be known as sulfa drugs. They're not perfect, but they're a huge step on our journey.
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This episode, we talk about the science that happens right before the famous antibiotics. Most notably, Paul Ehrlich discovers a cure for syphilis, the first drug to target a bacteria and actually cure it.
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This week, we illustrate just how bad life can be before antibiotics. As such, here's the worst bacterial disease I could think of off the top of my head: the bubonic plague. Sorry, but this episode's going to be a bit of a downer.
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A quick intro to this podcast.
TLDR:
My name is Kirby Gong.
This will update about weekly, with breaks between topics and holidays.
Seasons/episodes are standalone, but I recommend listening to the episodes within a season in order.
The first topic is Antibiotics, from before we had them, through their discovery, into the future.
Thanks for listening!
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