Reviews for Models of Achievement, Vol. 3

The average rating for Models of Achievement, Vol. 3 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-03 00:00:00 William Austin It is interesting that I read this book concurrently with Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, wherein her daughter nearly succumbs to sepsis created by the flu. I remember reading through those chapters and thinking, "my god this still happens!" I know factually that people still die from sepsis from bacteria and viruses; my childhood hero, Jim Henson passed in that same manner with pneumonia. I even know, logically, that this CAN happen to people in their prime- recently a local police officer passed from the flu. These things happen, all over the place, and all the time, but now it's rare enough its reported. I know these things logically, but I do not know them emotionally because this type of loss has been incredibly rare for everyone born after the "discovery/invention" of sulfa medicines and the rebirth of medicine that it spawned. People used to understand that a simple disease could suddenly take control of your body. A measly eighty years ago no one was untouched by that sort of death. My own father has a scar on his neck where the doctors had to cut in to treat a severe staph infection he received in the nursery at the hospital. Years later, another baby, born the same day as him, died from a staph infection kept in the same nursery he had been. He said it always gave him the chills to think about. Yet childbirth was one of the first near death experiences that almost everyone faced. It's a wonder that Freud never looked into that (or maybe he did), we came into the world potentially blinded from gonorrhea, weakened and defenseless against strep, staph, childbed fever, a simple cold, tuberculosis. Name it. Every baby born in a hospital before sulfa and semi-modern hygiene practices was nearly born one foot in the grave. Labor wards resembled morgues more than today's thriving delivery wards. This book really makes you appreciate that. It makes you appreciate the staggering amount of human suffering despite doctor's best (and not always misguided) efforts from medieval times to the early 1900's. It also makes you appreciate the up-hill battle to understand what was happening in our bodies when we were infected and how to stop it. It makes you appreciate what you have now . I thought that the author did a fantastic job of weaving interesting side-stories into the narrative. The horrors of WWI that set Domagk on a path to end the curse of infection, made you understand what could drive a man to fail for years, all the while believing that there was something out there that would act as a panacea. There were stories that strengthened the reader's understanding of the importance of sulfa- it saved Churchill's life in the middle of the war, it saved thousands and thousands of soldier's lives during the war, soldiers that had this been WWI, would have just died. He really let you see the world wide impact that it had- it helped form the FDA, it saved hundreds maybe thousands of Africans and Islanders. He brought the humanity back into medicine and let the reader see how the world became so transformed its nearly unrecognizable from then to now. Sure the doctors were catty, and maybe purposely obtuse. The evil of the Nazi's cannot be overstated. Neither can the fear that many non-Nazi Germans felt within their own country at the time. America's FDA had a rocky start, and hundreds needed to die before anything managed to get changed because of lobbyists. But it was a good story. And an important one. I definitely recommend it, though be prepared for it to slow down at times.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-07 00:00:00 Ben Markham 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.