Emil Von Behring: Infectious Disease, Immunology, Serum Therapy

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American Philosophical Society, 2005 - Biography & Autobiography - 580 pages
In 1901 Emil von Behring received the first Nobel Prize in medicine for serum therapy against diphtheria, a disease that killed thousands of infants annually. Diphtheria serum was the first major cure of the bacteriological era & its development generated novel procedures for testing, standardizing, & regulating drugs. Since the intro. of antibiotics, Behring & his work have largely been forgotten. In the first English-language scientific biography of Behring, Derek S. Linton seeks to restore Behring's reputation. He emphasizes Behring's seminal contributions to the study of infectious disease, the formation of modern immunology, & innovative research on specific remedies & vaccines against deadly microbial infections. Behring's research program is placed within the context of Imperial Germany's vibrant scientific culture. This biography explores his complex relations to the rival bacteriological schools of Robert Koch in Berlin & Louis Pasteur in Paris, the emergent German pharmaceutical industry, & the institutionalization of experimental therapeutic research. It also analyzes Behring's collaborations & controversies with leading med. researchers. The second part of the volume contains translations of 13 key articles by Behring & his associates on infectious diseases, immunology, drug testing, & therapeutics spanning 30 years of his remarkable scientific career.

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Page 373 - Refrain from these men, and let them alone : for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it ; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.
Page 70 - Über die Bedeutung der Mikroorganismen für die Entstehung der Diphtherie beim Menschen, bei der Taube und beim Kalbe [mit Demonstrationen).
Page 406 - Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988...
Page 203 - I always get wild whenever I think of that dark period and the way in which B. tried to hide our scientific partnership. But the revenge has come. He can see how far he has got without me since our separation. Everything is blocked now: his work on plague, cholera, glanders, streptococcal infections. He makes no progress with diphtheria — only hypotheses of a daring kind and a pseudo-exact manipulation of numbers. And all this with more than sufficient means in hand, and a swarm of collaborators...
Page 26 - ... an idealistic philosophy beside and above the mechanical cosmic theory of the Sciences of Matter, a union, which alone is able to reconcile that Idealism, to which the German people owes its greatness, with the results of the most recent investigation, And to obviate s total breach between the Future and the 1'ast, between the Intellect and the Heart.
Page 395 - Biographical Notes Bearing on Koch, Ehrlich, Behring and Loeffler, With Their Portraits and Letters From Three of Them," in Parasitology, 16 (1924), 214238— "Robert Koch, 1843-1910,
Page 8 - Koch, see Thomas D. Brock, Robert Koch: A Life in Medicine and Bacteriology (Washington, DC: ASM Press, 1999).
Page 15 - Metaphor," in AM Moulin and A. Cambrosio (eds.), Singular Selves: Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 179-201. Cohen, Irun R. (1992), "The Cognitive Paradigm and the Immunological Hommunculus," Immunology Today 13: 490-494.
Page 158 - Erwin H. Ackerknecht. Medicine at the Paris Hospital, 1794-1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967...
Page 5 - ... almost innocuous substances of bacterial origin, and there has apparently been placed almost within our grasp means for the specific treatment of many of these diseases. The hopes earlier aroused in the minds of a few of the most enthusiastic workers in bacteriology have been more than realized in respect to diphtheria, and their most extravagant predictions have been actually exceeded by the results. The control of this disease, one of the most dreaded and fatal of diseases in modern times,...