Drugs In The 17th And 18th Century Essay

Drugs were an important part of medicine. There were two important drugs from the 17th and 18th century. One was cinchona bark from a plant in Peru that was used for malaria. Cinchona bark may be the first drug used to cure a specific disease. The other drug was digitalis, made from the foxglove plant, which was purified by William Withering and used to treat a swelling of the body, which could be caused by many different kinds of illnesses (46). During the 1900s medicine advanced. For example, a German researcher, Paul Ehrlich, wanted to find a safer and more effective drug to treat syphilis, so he and his coworkers tested hundreds of compound until, on their 606th try, they found one that worked. Another example is the discovery of sulfa drugs. In 1932 a

Scientists later found that the substance was sulfanilamide. It didn’t kill the bacteria, but it did stop them from multiplying, so the immune system could fight them off. After this discovery, scientists created other compounds that did the same thing to other kinds of bacteria. They became known a sulfa drugs. Third, there is the discovery of penicillin. In August 1928 Alexander Fleming, a Scottish scientist, returned to his lab and found that one of his cultures had been ruined by a type of mold called Penicillium. When Fleming took a closer look he noticed that the bacteria around the mold were dying. Next, he tried to purify the substance in the mold. It was a long process, but he eventually got a small amount of the substance. Because the substance was hard to purify and it lost its healing powers when it was combined with blood, Fleming published his findings and moved on. Fortunately, about ten years later, two scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, found Fleming’s article. In 1940 they tested the drug on mice and discovered