614Chapter 30
Franklin Roosevelt). And some, such as influenza and
venereal diseases, were universal pandemics that few
could escape.
But the twentieth century also began with dramatic
medical progress. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded
in 1901, and the prize in physics went to Wilhelm
Roentgen for the discovery of X-rays while the first
prize in medicine went to a bacteriologist in Koch’s
Berlin laboratory for the discovery of the diphtheria an-
titoxin, which became a universal childhood inocula-
tion of the twentieth century. In 1909 another German
scientist, Paul Ehrlich, opened research into a new fam-
ily of drugs—antibacterial therapeutic drugs—with his
development of an arsenic-based treatment for syphilis
named Salvarsan. Syphilis had been one the greatest
scourges of the Belle Époque, killing more Europeans
per year than AIDS did at the end of the century. Sal-
varsan cut the syphilis infection rate in western Europe
by more than 50 percent before the First World War,
although its application was restricted by moralists who
denounced the drug for encouraging sin.
Many of the most deadly diseases of European his-
tory gradually fell to the laboratory work of microbiol-
ogists, biochemists, and pathologists. After diphtheria
and syphilis, yellow fever, typhus, tetanus, scarlet fever,
bubonic plague, malaria, measles, and polio were all
conquered or contained in Europe. Perhaps the most
historic moment in this conquest of disease came in
1979 when the World Health Organization (WHO)
announced that smallpox, the dreaded disease that had
formerly killed tens of thousands of Europeans every
year, had been totally eradicated. The last case of small-
pox, WHO reported, had passed without transmission
in 1977. Smallpox can, however, be revived because the
governments of the United States and Russia have both
stored samples of the smallpox virus.
The identification of the bacteria and viruses re-
sponsible for contagious diseases, and the development
of vaccines and drug therapies stand at the center of the
vital revolution of the twentieth century. No element of
this story is more dramatic than the discovery of the
powerful drugs that became available after 1945, popu-
larly known as the miracle drugs. Their discovery be-
gan in the late 1920s when Scottish physician and
bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin
and accelerated in 1935 when German pathologist Ger-
hard Domagk reported the discovery of the first an-
tibacterial drug in a group called sulfa drugs. Many
scientists contributed to the understanding and devel-
opment of these miracle drugs. A French-American
bacteriologist, René Dubos, developed the technique
for isolating antibacterial agents in 1939. An Australian-
born British pathologist, Sir Howard Florey, developed
Fleming’s penicillin into a powerful drug in 1940.
Shortly thereafter, Selman Waksman, an American mi-
crobiologist, introduced one of the strongest miracle
drugs—streptomycin—in 1944. During the late 1940s,
a dozen new drugs followed from this collective effort.
Thus, for much of the late twentieth century, miracle
drugs such as penicillin seemed to hint at the complete
conquest of disease. That optimism had faded by the
1990s, however, as viruses evolved that were resistant
to many antibiotics. The fight against contagious dis-
eases was not the only great medical contribution to
the vital revolution of the twentieth century—a century
that saw such remarkable procedures as open-heart
surgery, a range of organ transplantation, and even suc-
cesses with artificial organs.