Lightner Witmer: His Life and Times Book

The story of sulfa drugs makes for good reading, but the author's fascination with the scientist behind their discovery turns this book into an un-asked-for defense of the German people's conduct during the Nazi era. The author's story is uneven, so I'll go from the bad to the good.

Hager's book could have been thirty or forty pages shorter. He takes too long describing the experiments leading to the isolation of a sulfa drug by Dr. Gerhard Domagk, who one day would win a Nobel prize for it. He lingers too much over the Great War and wastes too many pages on the rollout of the new drug. The author explains away a shocking scandal in which Domagk's employer sat on his discovery for two years, and he depicts the Pasteur Institute as a dump whose nihilistic reasearchers were out to destroy the profitability of the German discovery just for the fun of it.

Because Hager identifies so much with Dr. Domagk the full story of sulfa loses its way. Dr. Domagk was a German scientist working for a German conglomerate in the runup to World War II, so the author feels it necessary to defend the actions of the German people and even individual Nazis to save his hero from accusations nobody ever made. Hager thus drags out the old tu quoque about the awful things the Americans and Russians did, ruining even that by deploring how invading American troops simply ruined Dr. Domagk's formal dinner jacket. Are you kidding me? When Domagk's involvement with sulfa ends, so does Hager's story. The author, in short, doesn't say enough about the right things.

Still, scientific discoveries are natural stories for human curiosity. Would you like to guess the main causes of hospital deaths in 1930? If you were born after that time, you probably have no idea. Hager does a good job framing the state of medical science which drove the search for chemical antibiotics. A skillful juxtaposition of the lives of the sons of two American presidents illustrates two separate worlds, a world of terror at the prospect of infections of any kind, followed by a glorious new world brought about by sulfa in which any illness seemed curable. It's here that Hager does his best work, helping to remind us of a time sulfa allowed us to forget about in the astonishing space of a single year.

I rated this book just an "okay" read because the weaknesses outweigh the strengths and the final chapter is a cut-and-paste job with no value for readers. But the story of sulfa is fascinating, and if you're interested (and you should be) you may well find it worthwhile to plow through the annoying parts of the story for the sake of the better ones.