ABSTRACT

References ........................................................................................................................................48

Physicians have used drugs for decades to treat infections. However, chemotherapy as a science began with Paul Ehrlich in the late 1800s. Dr. Ehrlich was a German medical scientist who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology of Medicine in 1908. He realized that like human and animal cells, certain bacteria cells colored with certain dyes while others did not. He postulated that it might be possible to make certain dyes, or chemicals, that would kill bacteria while not harming the host organism. He conducted hundreds to thousands of experiments testing dyes against various microorganisms. It wasn’t until his 606th experimental compound that he discovered a medically useful drug. This compound, later named

salvarsan

, was arsenic based, and the first treatment for syphilis [1]. In 1889, Vuillemin, a French bacteriologist, suggested using the word

antiobiosis

, meaning “against life,” to describe the group of drugs that had action against microorganisms [2]. Selman Waksman, an American microbiologist and the discoverer of streptomycin, later changed this term to

antibiotic

[3]. Many antibiotics have been discovered since then (Table 2.1), but the discovery of penicillin may be one of the most important events in the practice of infectious disease medicine. To date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved 18 antibiotics derived from penicillin and 25 classified as cephalosporins [4,5].