From Aspirin to Viagra: Stories of the Drugs That Changed the World Read online

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  Popular Science

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  Vladimir Marko

  From Aspirin to Viagra

  Stories of the Drugs that Changed the World

  Vladimir MarkoBratislava, Slovakia

  Springer Praxis Books

  ISSN 2626-6113e-ISSN 2626-6121

  Popular Science ISBN 978-3-030-44285-9e-ISBN 978-3-030-44286-6

  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44286-6

  English translation by Skrivanek Slovensko, www.skrivanek.sk, of the original Slovak edition published by Ikar, Bratislava, 2018

  © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018, 2020

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  To my wife for 44 years of our lives

  Preface

  Recently, I opened our medicine cabinet at home and found an assortment of 36 different drugs. And honestly, my wife and I consider ourselves to be healthy people. If we look back 100 years, we would have had, at best, bottles of aspirin and quinine. It is very difficult to imagine the world at the dawn of the 20th century, when we were unaware of the existence of very common things used today, like penicillin, insulin or vitamin C, let alone innovations like contraceptives or drugs that fight mental disorders. We did not know a large majority of the drugs that we see as a natural part of our lives today, to the point that often we are not even aware of how we depend on them. Had these drugs not existed, the majority of us would not even be alive today and would not be able to read this book. Our parents or our grandparents would likely have died due to one of the vast number of deadly diseases that have plagued humankind since the beginning of time.

  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, starting from ancient times, diseases were thought to be caused by an imbalance of four basic bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Doctors were meant to rebalance these fluids through methods like bloodletting, the use 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 situation 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 complain 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 unofficial 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 different 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 necessary 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 greatly 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’s intent was not to describe the drugs as such, but instead to map the road that was taken to their discovery or invention. The road was often rough, but also adventurous. At the same time, the author looked to record the circumstances associated with their subsequent life. This book is also about the people who chose this path. The majority of them, with the exception of a few charlatans, were inspired by their deep need to help others and by their belief that what they were doing was the right thing, even if by today’s standards their methods were harsh.

  Vladimir Marko

  January 2020

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following experts for so kindly reading parts of the manuscript, providing their expertise and sharing with me their inestimable observations: Dr. Viera Kořínková, CSc; Dr. Katarína Rašlová, CSc; Dr. Katarína Mikušová, PhD; Dr. Danica Caisová; and Dr. Dušan Krkoška, PhD.

  Contents

  1 Aspirin

  Story 1.​1:​ The curious reverend and the bark of the willow

  Story 1.​2:​ The three fathers and the two miracle drugs

  Story 1.​3:​ The industrialist and his business

  Story 1.​4:​ The great German patriot and the Great Phenol Plot

  Story 1.​5:​ The man from New Zealand and marketing magic

  Story 1.​6:​ The country doctor and medicinal gum

  Concluding remarks

  2 Quinine

  Story 2.​1:​ The Countess of Chinchón and the Jesuit Bark

  Story 2.​2:​ The succes
sful charlatan and the miracle medicine

  Story 2.​3:​ The two friends and the yellow cinchona

  Story 2.​4:​ The unlucky adventurer and the alpacas

  Story 2.​5:​ The two opposing scientists and the mosquitoes with spotted wings

  Concluding remarks

  3 Vitamin C

  Story 3.​1:​ The famous admiral and scurvy

  Story 3.​2:​ The ship’s doctor and Murphy’s Law

  Story 3.​3:​ The snob and the 7,000 cannons

  Story 3.​4:​ The Norwegian hygienist and guinea pigs

  Story 3.​5:​ The Hungarian politician and Hungarian paprika

  Story 3.​6:​ The hardworking chemist and the role of wine flies

  Concluding remarks

  4 Insulin

  Story 4.​1:​ The bold experimenter and sweet urine

  Story 4.​2:​ The military doctor in Barbados and various diets

  Story 4.​3:​ Two diabetologists, starvation, and Elizabeth the Iconic

  Story 4.​4:​ The vivid scientist from Mauritius and the elixir of youth

  Story 4.​5:​ The aspiring amateur and the elixir of life

  Story 4.​6:​ The strong-minded scientist and her four hands

  Concluding remarks

  5 Penicillin

  Story 5.​1:​ The doctor with stained hands and the magic bullet

  Story 5.​2:​ The rejected Nobel Prize and saving young Hildegard

  Story 5.​3:​ The Scottish bacteriologist and his return from vacation

  Story 5.​4:​ Three Englishmen and the benefits of America

  Story 5.​5:​ Stubborn Andy and the need for meat

  Story 5.​6:​ The renowned health professional and ethical blindness

  Concluding remarks

  6 The Pill

  Story 6.​1:​ Madame Restell and Fifth Avenue abortions

  Story 6.​2:​ The revolutionary and birth control

  Story 6.​3:​ The controversial biologist and his controversial experiments

  Story 6.​4:​ The Catholic gynecologist and his futile hope

  Story 6.​5:​ The three brilliant chemists

  Concluding remarks

  7 Chlorpromazine

  Story 7.​1:​ The enlightened doctor and freeing the insane

  Story 7.​2:​ Many attempts and difficult beginnings for treatment

  Story 7.​3:​ A French thinker and his lytic cocktail

  Story 7.​4:​ A professor, his assistant, and psychiatric penicillin

  Story 7.​5:​ Psychoanalysis and the need to know foreign languages

  Concluding remarks

  8 Prozac

  Story 8.​1:​ Two psychiatrists, a singing cyclist, and dancing patients

  Story 8.​2:​ Three chemists and three neurotransmitter​s

  Story 8.​3:​ The role of the medicine box

  Story 8.​4:​ How we forgot to grieve

  Concluding remarks

  9 Viagra

  Story 9.​1:​ The autodidact of Delft and the penis’s status in history

  Story 9.​2:​ The son of a Russian vodka maker and elixirs of youth

  Story 9.​3:​ The biggest charlatan and the deepest desires of men

  Story 9.​4:​ A urologist drops his pants and what men are willing to endure

  Story 9.​5:​ The big medicine producer and the farmer’s beautiful daughter

  Concluding remarks

  10 Vaccines

  Story 10.​1:​ A beautiful aristocrat and the Ottoman method

  Story 10.​2:​ A wise farmer, a famous doctor and how vaccination got its name

  Story 10.​3:​ A sick slave and the chain transfer of vaccines across the Atlantic

  Story 10.​4:​ Two greats and only one Nobel Prize

  Story 10.​5:​ “Sir Almost Wright” and military brains

  Story 10.​6:​ The Righteous Among the Nations and lice feeders

  Story 10.​7:​ The Somali cook and a huge victory

  Story 10.​8:​ A gastroenterologi​st and one of the worst hoaxes in medicine

  Concluding remarks

  11 Conclusion

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Dr. Vladimir MarkoPhD comes from Slovakia. He was born in 1952. He studied at the Slovak Technical University, finishing his studies in organic chemistry in 1975 and his PhD studies in biochemistry in 1980. He then spent ten years working as a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Pharmacology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences before changing his professional life completely by moving into business as a country representative of the Dutch company Chrompack, dealing with analytical instruments. From 1994, he worked for 20 years for the Danish-based pharmaceutical company Lundbeck, first as a representative and later as the Managing Director for Slovakia.

  He is the author of numerous scientific papers concerning the synthesis and analysis of drugs and was the editor for a book dealing with drug determinations (Marko V., Ed.: Determination of Beta-Blockers in Biological Material, Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, New York, 1989, ISBN 0-444-87305-8). Dr. Marko has also authored several tens of popular articles that have been published in various Slovak weeklies, dealing with drugs, medicine and history.

  He likes running (he has run 20 marathons) and mountaineering, and regards himself as a connoisseur of food and drink.

  He has been married for 44 years, with no children.

  © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

  V. MarkoFrom Aspirin to ViagraSpringer Praxis Bookshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44286-6_1

  1. Aspirin

  Vladimir Marko1

  (1)Bratislava, Slovakia

  Vladimir Marko

  No other medicine has such a long and rich history as aspirin. The story of aspirin dates back to ancient times, when people were just beginning to learn of the medicinal properties of willow bark – a kind of predecessor of aspirin. Willow bark was a part of ancient Egyptian, classical, and medieval medicine, though the first scientific mention of its effects comes from the mid-18th century.

  It has been over 120 years since aspirin was first introduced as a pharmaceutical preparation, yet even today you would be hard pressed to find a household that does not have those little, white, acetylsalicylic acid-containing tablets in the medicine cabinet. It is hard to imagine that this small wonder can relieve pain, reduce fever and stop a migraine, prevent heart attacks, strokes and thrombosis, and even potentially be used to treat certain types of cancer.

  In the stories about the history of aspirin, you will meet a curious vicar, an unrecognized Jewish inventor, and one of the first great captains of industry. You will also meet a spy, uncommonly resourceful marketers, and, of course, plenty of dedicated chemists and physicians. The history of aspirin plays out against the backdrop of the history of the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, allowing us to see how the industry developed from modest beginnings in the late 19th century, when it was something of a pendant on the dye industry chain, all the way through to today, when it is one of the largest and most powerful economic sectors with an annual turnover of nearly a trillion dollars.

  The name aspirin itself can be contentious. While in some countries, such as Germany, the name Aspirin is a registered trademark with strict rules for capitalizing the first letter, in most countries the word aspirin is used as a genericized name without the initial capital.

  Story 1.1: The curious reverend and the bark of the willow

  Chipping Norton is a smallish, idyllic town in the county of Oxfordshire, England, situated about 30 km northwest of Oxford. According to the most recent census taken in 2011, it has an exact population of 6,337 residents. It is home to the Church of the Virgin Mary which dates back to the 15th century and it also boasts the oldest golf course in the county. The church was recently used as a location for a recording studio, frequented by such legends as Duran Duran, Status Quo and Alison Moyet. We s
hould note that as a village, Chipping Norton is not only idyllic, but also very healthy. Nine out of ten residents claimed to be satisfied with their own health, according to a recent study.

  Let us go back 260 years. If a similar study had been carried out in the mid-18th century, the era where our first story takes place, we would have found the results to be the exact opposite. By all accounts, almost everyone would have been afflicted with some of the many common illnesses at the time. High humidity, poor hygiene and malnutrition were, by and large, the main reasons for the majority of diseases. The causes of illness were unknown and treatment methods were from medieval times at best. Essentially, only two medical interventions existed at the time – laxatives and bloodletting – and a visit to the doctor was much more expensive than self-treatment, which only made matters worse. At the time of our story, the Reverend Edward Stone himself was not particularly healthy. When we meet him in 1758, he is 56 years old, quite an advanced age for a man in the 18th century. He lived alone on the outskirts of the town and his position as chaplain in nearby Chipping Norton secured him a comfortable living. Like many older people, Edward suffered with rheumatism.