The work of Paul Ehrlich and his position in the history of medical research / [T.S. Work].

  • Work, T. S. (Thomas Spence)
Date:
1954
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The work of Paul Ehrlich and his position in the history of medical research / [T.S. Work]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    first obstretric ward of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna in 1846 he found that the mortality rate from puerperal sepsis was so high that women begged in tears not to be taken into the ward. He found that students were coming straight to the ward from post mortem dissections without washing their hands yet, when he instituted a system of hand washing in dilute calcium hypochlorite and reduced the mortality rate his ideas on contagion were ridiculed by his colleagues and he quitted Vienna in disgust. In 1546 there was published in Venice a small book by Giro¬ lamo Fracastoro in which there was a complete outline of the con¬ tagious theory of disease, but Fracastoro lacked a microscope and his ideas died with him. One hundred and fifty years later, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, using his improved microscopes was sending accurate descriptions of intestinal bacteria to the Royal Society in London but he knew nothing of disease. Dobell (1932) in his classical bio¬ graphy says “neither here nor elsewhere in his writings does Leeu¬ wenhoek associate the entozoic protozoa or bacteria with the causa¬ tion of disease”. One hundred years after the death of Leeuwenhoek there was still no marriage between the two ideas but in 1834 another amateur, an Italian lawyer Agostino Bassi, set light to the accumulated pile of ignorance and observation by his demonstration that the silk worm disease “mal del segno” was transmitted from worm to worm by a cryptogamic fungus. At first the pile was slow to burn but fanned by the efforts of Pasteur, Lister, Davaine and Koch it finally burst into flame just as Paul Ehrlich completed his medical course. In 1878 Robert Koch published his studies on infective dis¬ eases in which he proved by experiments on animals that a series of clinically distinct diseases could be produced by the injection of putrid material and could be maintained by serial passage. In the same year Ehrlich presented his doctorate thesis “Beitrage zur Theorie und Praxis der histologischen Farbung” (his first pub¬ lication was on the same subject and appeared one year earlier). The Guiding Principle Ehrlich's work can be divided into three main periods. From 1877-1890 he developed the theme outlined in his doctorate thesis, from 1891 to 1904 his interest was mainly centered on immunity and from 1905 onwards on chemotherapy while throughout the whole period he maintained an active interest in cancer. Despite