Medicine Looks Ahead 239 



mortality rate from 25 to less than 5 per cent. He made his 

 report in London that summer at the International Congress 

 of Microbiology. In the audience was Dr. Perrin Long of 

 Johns Hopkins Hospital, who hurried home to Baltimore and 

 began to try the drug, first on mice and then on men. 



"America first became aware of sulfanilamide just before 

 the end of 1936, when Dr. Long was called in to use the new 

 drug on the son of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., 

 then a student at Harvard. Young Roosevelt had been taken 

 to a Boston hospital with a "strep" throat. From that time on 

 sulfanilamide and its derivatives have passed from one success 

 to another." 



Sulfanilamide the "mother drug" proved successful in 

 the fighting of thirty different bacterial diseases. The list of 

 diseases that it will combat reads like the label on a patent- 

 medicine bottle, but, unlike the patent medicines, the sulfa 

 drug really worked. It did, however, have toxic effects on 

 patients nausea, dizziness, fever. So scientists analyzed sul- 

 fanilamide and sought to produce derivatives that would kill 

 germs and still not harm the body. 



Sulfanilamide is a complex molecule of carbon, hydrogen, 

 nitrogen, oxygen, and sulphur. By adding other molecules of 

 carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulphur, chemists obtained the 

 various derivatives of sulfanilamide. 



Sulf apyridine proved to be more effective than the "mother 

 drug" in fighting certain types of pneumonia and gonorrhea. 

 Its toxic effects were about equal to sulfanilamide, but since it 

 worked faster it could be used with less danger to the patient. 



Sulfathiazole has been equally effective against most dis- 

 eases and is far less toxic than the other two drugs. Peritonitis, 

 the deadly infection resulting from a burst appendix, has lost 

 its terror because of sulfathiazole. 



Sulfadiazine appears to be far less toxic than the others and 

 much more powerful as a germ killer. It can even be used to 



