The Demon Under the Microscope

I finished reading Thomas Hager’s The Demon Under the Microscope two days ago, but have not really had a chance to put my thoughts together.

It was a fun book to read and interesting because although I knew a little bit about the discovery of penicillin and its role in shaping modern medicine, I knew very little about sulfa drugs, their discovery, and the major role they played up until penicillin came to the fore.  It is a fascinating story and because it is told in story form more than as a scholarly tract, it really made me think about how this discovery affected life and the practice medicine.  It certainly gives one pause to think about the changes in the knowledge and practice of medicine in the last 70 years, one lifetime really.  Oh I knew this intellectually.  But what we know in our heads doesn’t always make us think about what how we perceive our lives on a daily basis.

That said the book is a very easy and entertaining read, and in some ways is more gripping and suspenseful than some novels I have read.  It is obviously written for a lay audience, and a broad-based one at that.  The language and the story line reminds me, in attitude at least, to some of those biographies and histories I read when I was young, the ones aimed at the "young adult" market.  I would plow right through them, reading them like I was eating candy, learning something on the way that often led me to pursue subjects further, in much more scholarly works.  This book is like that: fast, readable, not too difficult but full of information.  It seems to be well researched and well thought out.  The lack of footnotes were frustrating at first, when I wanted to find a reference for something, but soon I just sat back and enjoyed the story. Generally I did not look up the notes at all while reading, just enjoyed the act of reading, eager to find out what would happen next, although the end result was obvious all along.  In the end, when I had questions about this or that, the notes turned out to be handy.

The book has its biases.  At times Hager does not sound at all happy with the modern world of scientific drug research and physicians who hand out prescriptions right and left.  He seems to prefer his noble researchers and their "selfless" pursuits.  I would accuse him of romanticizing the past somewhat.  And I am not saying that modern medicines and drugs are perfect.  We have solved so many things, but we do get carried away with new inventions, using them far more heavily and more things that perhaps we should.  It is good to be cautious.  To a certain extent we are a population of guinea pigs (Hager does NOT say this) growing up using and be surrounded by things that were unknown to generations upon generations of human beings.  There are bound to be side affects and effects of things that only turn up after 30 or 40 or 50 years or more.  But at the same time these inventions have also done so much good.  We take so much for granted today, we forget that a simple infection, the flu, pneumonia, could kill not all that very long ago. Reading Hager’s account reminded me of how truly far we have come, and how easy it is to become excessive in our enthusiasms for new things.